Jamaluddin Aram
Jamaluddin Aram is a writer from Kabul, whose work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The New Quarterly, and The Globe and Mail. His debut novel, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday won the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. In 2020, Aram was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers – Short Fiction. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Union College and lives in Toronto.
Writers & Books
Videos
2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Short Fiction finalist Jamaluddin Aram
Award History
Jury Citation
“'This Hard Easy Life' is as insightful as it is heartbreaking; a story about the ways in which even love itself can become a kind of prison. Through intimate detail, compelling prose, and quiet, emotionally devastating scenes, Jamaluddin Aram gives the reader a nuanced look at life before and after displacement. This complicated, compassionate work of fiction reminds us that who and what we are is forever and inextricably tied to where we are, and where we are not. A painful, beautiful story." —2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Short Fiction Jury (Kris Bertin, Djamila Ibrahim, and Carrianne Leung)Juror History
Program History
2020 - Mentee
Writers’ Trust Mentorship
Mentor
Michael Christie
Citation
Jamaluddin Aram's manuscript, “On the Hill the Graves” is a collection of eight interconnected stories set in a small, impoverished neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, between 1989 and 1995. To make sense of life and the brutalities of an on-going civil war, characters turn to superstition, myths, dreams, gossip and in the case of Khoja, the bonesetter and herbalist, reciting classic Persian poetry to his cat in the cool darkness of his shop.
Works Recognized by WT