Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin (born 1963) is a Pakistani-American short-story writer, born in Los Angeles to a Pakistani senior civil servant and a Norwegian-American mother and raised in Lahore. Educated at Dartmouth and Yale Law School, he practised corporate law in New York before returning to Pakistan to run his family's farm in Punjab, writing in the early mornings. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders has been translated into sixteen languages and won The Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; he divides his time between Oslo and his farm in Pakistan. ¹

Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April 1963. ^{1 2} His father, Ghulam Mueenuddin, had served in the Indian Civil Service and became Secretary of Pakistan's Establishment Division; posted to Washington in the late 1950s as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty, he met and married Barbara, a reporter at The Washington Post, and the couple moved to Pakistan in 1960. The infant Daniyal was flown to Los Angeles for his birth, at his grandfather's insistence, and was brought back to Pakistan two months later; the family settled in Lahore, where he attended the Lahore American School and remembers his youth as a magical time of hunting and riding. ¹ At thirteen, after his parents separated, he moved with his mother and brother to the United States, attended Groton School and graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth. He returned to Pakistan in the summers of his graduation to find his father, then in his eighties, losing control of the family's prosperous mango farm; at his father's request he stayed to rescue it, running it as a business with well-paid managers, and spent the early mornings writing poetry. ¹ In 1993, with the farm running smoothly, he went back to the United States for Yale Law School, where he edited the Yale Journal of International Law, then worked briefly at Human Rights Watch and as a corporate lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York from 1998 to 2001. Finding that life unsatisfying, he resigned, returned to Pakistan, earned an MFA at the University of Arizona in 2004, and began writing the farm stories that became his book. ¹

His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gathers linked stories of the farm and the city — servants, drivers, cooks, landlords and the new businessmen of a dissolving feudal order — drawn from the years he lived on the family farm in Punjab. ¹ The collection has been translated into sixteen languages and won The Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, along with other honours and wide critical acclaim. ¹ He has said that sitting in a Manhattan skyscraper office he realised he was in a unique position to write these stories for a Western audience — stories of the old feudal ways and the new way coming. ¹

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