Author Qais Akbar Omar to Give Reading April 21

Qais Akbar Omar is the author of “A Fort of Nine Towers,” which has been published in more than 20 languages and the co-author of “A Night in the Emperor’s Garden,” which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Sunday Times and The Globe and Mail, and he has published short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, Guernica and elsewhere. In 2014–15 Omar was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University.

 

Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Kabul University. He studied business at Brandeis University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University.

 

In Afghanistan, Omar worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He also worked for the United Nations. He comes from a family of carpet traders, and he served as a textiles specialist for U.S. Agency for International Development and the Asian Development Bank, helping carpet weavers across Afghanistan.

The event begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public. This event will be held in the Gund Reading Room of the school’s Armour Academic Center. Ample parking is available in the parking lot adjacent to Armour.