Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a renowned Pakistani and British writer and novelist, best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to."

She writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio. Kamila Shamsie was born in Karachi, where she grew up. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at the University of Massachusetts she wrote In The City By The Sea, published by Granta Books UK in 1998, which was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999.

Her 2000 novel Salt and Saffron led to Shamsie’s selection as one of Orange’s “21 Writers of the 21st Century.” With her third novel, Kartography, Shamsie was again shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys award in the UK.