Learning how

Tahmima Anam
(Dominic Chavez/Globe Staff)

Some novelists shun creative writing programs, for fear that an academic setting will have a negative effect on their writing, or at best do no good. To Tahmima Anam, profiled in today's Globe, the benefit was clear. I asked her how she began to write the novel, "A Golden Age," set in her native Bangladesh at the time of the war of independence from Pakistan in 1971. She had just completed her PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, in the spring of 2004.

"I finished my dissertation and moved to london, and signed up for an MFA in creative writing at the University of London with [English poet laureate] Andrew Motion. I wanted to write a novel but had no idea how I would do it. Given that I had been in school my whole life, I thought I should just go back to school and try to fiugure it out.

"One thing I worried about was, would people who knew nothing about Bangladesh have an interest in reading stories set 37 years ago in a country they had never heard of, or knew much about? The people in the class were not only helping me editorially but were also giving me the confidence to write. They were saying, 'If you do a good job, we will keep reading the next chapter. I spent the year [it was a one-year program] working on it, and at the end, had written three chapters, which I then sent off to publishers, and here we are."

She had no agent, yet the book was accepted by British publisher John Murray. Published last March, it was a finalist for the Guardian First Fiction Award, and is a part of a projected trilogy. You can hear her read from the book here.