Aamina Ahmad

Aamina Ahmad's debut novel, The Return of Faraz Ali was published in May 2022 from Riverhead Books. Aamina grew up in London. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2015-2017. Her play, The Dishonored, toured the UK in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, One Story, The Normal School, The Missouri Review, Ecotone and the anthology, And the World Changed. 

The Value of Support

"The Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award gave me the incredible gift of time to write, thanks to the extra childcare and a reduced teaching load. But just as important was the fact that the award also gave me a greater sense of the worth of my project; I know I faced up to the doubts and anxieties I still had about my story with more courage because of it. What’s more, being able to finish a draft as I did, allowed me to finally really see myself as a writer. The award was transformative in so many ways and the value of the support I received is impossible to truly measure, but I will be forever grateful for it; it allowed me to tell a story that mattered to me and made me feel that it mattered that I tell it."