Penguin Speakers Bureau

Ali Sethi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1984. “I grew up watching a lot of American television,” he says. “I had American magazines and books, alongside a British colonial education, plus the Urdu and Punjabi cultures of my family. I grew up inhabiting many people’s cultures simultaneously.” He attended Aitchison College in Lahore, a school founded by the British for the sons of the aristocracy, but which now enrolls students from diverse backgrounds and all parts of Pakistan. A trained vocalist in the North Indian classical tradition, he originally intended to be a musician.

Sethi was an indifferent student in his younger years, but resolved to excel in high school and won admission to Harvard University, where he was the only Pakistani in his class. He threw himself into literature and creative writing, taking courses with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh, as well as the critic James Wood. Coming from a scientifically-oriented academic milieu in which writing books was considered at best a hobby and at worst a waste, he drew from his professors the conviction that reading and writing were legitimate pursuits. Sethi was particularly influenced by Wood’s aesthetic approach to writing and reading: “Write the kind of book you want to read, and read the kind of book you want to write,” as Sethi describes it.

In Ghosh’s course, Sethi wrote a short story that became the basis for The Wish Maker, his debut novel. “It was nostalgia that led me to write it,” Sethi says. “I was thinking of home on a cool March night in Massachusetts, and the songs and sights all came rushing back.” Ironically, it was at Harvard that Sethi also rediscovered South Asian history (heavily colored by politics in Pakistan) and the Urdu language, which he grew up speaking along with English.

Sethi is the son of newspaper publisher Jugnu Mohsin and editor Najam Sethi, founders of the influential Pakistani newspaper The Friday Times. Najam Sethi is also the owner of a well-known bookstore in Lahore called Vanguard Books. As pro-democracy journalists and activists, Sethi’s parents were constant targets of government surveillance during his youth and frequently ran afoul of the authorities. The family’s telephones were tapped, they were often tailed by intelligence agents, and their home was broken into. Sethi’s father was imprisoned briefly when Ali was an infant and again for a month when he was fifteen. After suffering a heart attack in jail, his father came to the United States for by-pass surgery. While the family stayed with friends living in Washington, D.C., Ali worked as an intern in the office of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut.

Through the prism of his family’s experiences, Sethi witnessed the political turmoil and creeping Islamization of the 1990s that form the backdrop for The Wish Maker. He was four when martial law ended and his parents and everyone they knew went out to elect Benazir Bhutto as prime minister for the first time. She was dismissed from office by the military when he was six, then voted back in when he was nine and ousted again when he was twelve. In those years, Sethi accompanied both his parents to numerous political demonstrations. Absorbed by their professional and political commitments, his unconventional parents were largely absent from his childhood. Sethi and his sister spent much of their time with his grandparents, with whom they were immersed in a large extended family. “Like Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird,” Sethi says, “we were often in the position of having to defend our parents.”

Sethi has contributed to The Nation and the op-ed page of The New York Times, where he has written recently about the rapidly shifting political situation in Pakistan. The nation has changed dramatically, he notes, since 2003, when his novel ends. The blowback from the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror, in which Pakistan is intimately involved, has hit home with force. Bombings have become a frequent occurrence throughout the country. Quranic cable TV stations preach Islamic fundamentalism, and Saudi money funds religious schools and pilgrimages to Mecca. The enemies of democracy include not only repressive military factions, as in the past, but also religious extremists who operate outside the structure of Pakistan’s institutions. “Now it’s much worse,” Sethi says, “because you can’t challenge them in court.”

Sethi currently lives in Lahore.

Learn more about this speaker

"Pakistan, Drowning in Neglect"
The New York Times

"One Myth, Many Pakistans"
The New York Times

The Wish Maker Review
The New York Times

"Authors: Militants' Influence Growing In Pakistan"
NPR

The Wish Maker Review
People

Ali Sethi Interview
PBS's Tavis Smiley

The Wish Maker Review
San Jose Mercury News

"The Wish Maker Grows Up In Pakistan, Lyrically"
Seattlest

Ali Sethi Interview
On Point with Tom Ashbrook

Ali Sethi Discusses The Wish Maker
Riverhead Books