A Bangladeshi novelist has won Britain's oldest literary award with her debut novel In the Light of What We Know. Writer Zia Haider Rahman has joined some of world's greatest literary names by winning this year James Tait Black Literary Prizes, awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh, since 1919. The winner was announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday.
Zia, born in rural Bangladesh was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities.
The winning book in the fiction prize released in the spring of 2014.
Zia's story revolves around an investment banker who on one September morning in 2008 receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse at a time when his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling. The A bold novel is set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.
The banker then recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes readers on a journey of exhilarating scope -- from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton -- and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war.
