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FiveBooks Interviews
Syed Ashfaqul Haque is Chief News Editor at The Daily Star, the largest circulating English language daily newspaper in Bangladesh. Ashfaqul began his career as an apprentice subeditor at The Daily Star nearly 20 years ago, when the newspaper was a year old. In 2009 his investigative report on corruption in imports won the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) Investigative Journalism Award, the Unesco-Bangladesh Journalism Award and the Dhaka Reporters Unity Award for best economic investigative report. Ashfaqul talks to FiveBooks about his nation’s struggle for independence, the repression of journalists and his five favourite books about Bangladesh.
Travel writer and historian William Dalrymple wrote his first book, In Xanadu, at the age of 22. Since then he has published seven further books and been awarded a host of awards for his writing and broadcasting. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories 2008 selected by Salman Rushdie. For a number of years he practised law in New York. He is based on his family’s farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab – which inspired his collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – but is living in London for the next ten months while his wife pursues her graduate studies. Daniyal Mueenuddin talks to FiveBooks about the changing face of Pakistan.
Lord Meghnad Desai is a British economist and a Labour politician. He was born in Baroda, India and made a life peer as Baron Desai of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster in April 1991. He is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, and the author of Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, a book that predicts that globalization will lead to the revival of socialism. In choosing Five Books on India, he marvels at the Indian people’s incredible tenacity for democracy and self-advancement since gaining independence from the British in 1947.
Paddy Docherty is a historian and natural resources specialist, and the author of The Khyber Pass: a History of Empire and Invasion. This won the Financial Times Book of the Year in 2007 and was short-listed for the Longman History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008. Paddy is currently based in Prague, where he is writing his second book, which focuses on natural resource politics in Africa. Here Paddy talks to FiveBooks about one of the world’s most enigmatic and dangerous places.
Ahilan Kadirgamar is a fellow at the Asia Society in New York. He is a spokesperson for the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum www.srilankademocracy.org) as well as a contributing editor to Himal Southasian magazine (www.himalmag.com). A Tamil dissenter, his views are often under attack from both sides in the conflict.