Tariq Ali Biography

Pakistani writer, born in Lahore, educated in Pakistan and at Oxford University. He first gained a reputation as a Marxist journalist and political activist (he was involved with the Vietnam Solidarity campaign), and later worked as a documentary film-maker and television producer. His Marxist orientation is reflected in his first published works, including Pakistan: People's Power or Military Rule (1970) and Can Pakistan Survive? (1983). Ali turned to creative writing late in his career, with Partition (1987), a screenplay adapted from an Urdu short story, which was followed by Iranian Nights (1989), a play written with Howard Brenton, based on the Rushdie affair. His first novel, Redemption (1990), is a satirical comment on the vagaries of the far left in Britain and the consequences upon intellectuals of the fall of Eastern European communism. His next, The Shadow of the Pomegranate (1992), set in 1500 in Southern Spain and written to coincide with the commemoration of 1492, is an entertaining account of the fortunes of one Muslim family in the aftermath of the fall of Granada and the rise of Christian fundamentalism in Spain.