Research interests
My thesis is in two parts: the fiction and the critical commentary. Focusing on the stories of three women shaped by the expectations and attitudes of the times in which they live, the novel covers the periods 1921-1937, 1937-1972 and 1973 and participates in the discourse on women's changing historical circumstances and new class and gender identities. It can therefore be read in the category of a novel of manners or a middlebrow novel. My purpose has been to explore, through creating my own characters and story, the dramatic social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place in the middle part of the twentieth century for Western women, and my fiction responds to and is inflected by the style of narration pertaining at the time. It engages, for instance, with the ‘reality' constructed by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Christa Wolf and Margaret Drabble within the genre of women's fiction: of women writing for each other, in a small-scale and intimate way, and integrating the story of an individual life with the circumstances of the time.
Additional Experience
During my MA studies, I published short fiction in two postgraduate edited anthologies,
Unwrapped
and
Losing the Plot
. I also participated in the launches of these, attended by writers, publishers and agents. While working on my PhD I have published on the recasting in English of an Urdu short story by my supervisor, Aamer Hussein.
Publications
‘Short Scene from a Friendship', ‘A Friend from the Past', ‘Just Once in my Life' and ‘Memories' in
Unwrapped
(Southampton: Torque Press, 2008), pp. 119-32
‘Amber' in
Losing the Plot
(Southampton: Torque Press, 2009), pp. 237-55
‘Knotted Tongue: English version',
Asymptote
, October 2012
