batmannow
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2008
- Messages
- 18,830
- Reaction score
- -19
- Country
- Location
Jemima to tell all about Pak Encounters
AMIT ROY
The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | Jemima to tell all about Pak <I>Encounters</I>
London, Oct. 10: Jemima Khan is to write a book on Pakistan, where she lived for almost a decade after marrying Imran Khan when she was only 21 and where she later became a critic of General Pervez Musharraf.
The book, provisionally called Surprising Encounters, is being promoted by literary agents A.P. Watt at the Frankfurt Book Fair and will be published in October 2011 by Virago Press, which specialises in feisty women authors.
Although Jemima, now 35 and the mother of two sons by Imran, features regularly in London gossip columns, she has in a sense outgrown both her former husband who has made no headway in Pakistani politics and her on-off actor boyfriend, Hugh Grant, who is now surviving on his past reputation (though his career may yet be revived if he manages to turn in a convincing performance as Lord Mountbatten in Indian Summer, a forthcoming film about Edwinas relationship with Nehru).
In marked contrast, Jemima has grown in maturity and stature. Two years ago she led demonstrations outside Downing Street against Musharrafs military dictatorship when the then Pakistan President was meeting Gordon Brown, and helped ensure no serious harm came to her former husband who had been locked up under a military state of emergency.
Nor will a ghostwriter have to do the work for Jemima, who writes regularly, elegantly and with humour for British newspapers, often about Pakistan. Once, she scooped better-known journalists by securing a celebrated interview with Musharraf the general apparently wanted to meet her to see if she really was as pretty as she appeared in her photographs (she had a lot of fun with him in her interview).
According to A.P. Watt of London, which was founded in 1875 and describes itself as the longest-established literary agency in the world, the book on Pakistan will be an accessible and anecdotal, witty and revealing portrait of a country at the febrile epicentre of world affairs.
The agency elaborates: In this book she revisits the country she got to know in the 1990s, undertaking a journey which begins in Lahore, moves north to Peshawar and Islamabad before heading down to Karachi. Along the way, she encounters a dazzling array of people the ordinary, the infamous and the extraordinary who best illustrate the paradoxes of this country of 165 million people, which encompasses more than a dozen languages, several hundred tribes and is very different from the bearded zealots or military men of the stereotype.
Jemima now lives in London but has remained involved in Pakistan, raising funds after the 2005 earthquake and setting up the Free Pakistan campaign in 2007 to protest the state of emergency during which her ex-husband was incarcerated.
A.P. Watts statement makes it clear Jemima is more than just a pretty face: She was a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. She now writes regularly for the Sunday Times and is a contributing editor for British Vogue. Her writing has also appeared in the Evening Standard, Vanity Fair, Independent and Independent on Sunday.
Jemima will be an outsider able to provide an insiders account: Jemima Goldsmith was just 21 when she married Imran Khan, converted to Islam, began to learn Urdu and moved into his extended family house in Lahore, Pakistan. During the next decade she came to know and love Pakistan, the land of the Pure, in all its bewildering complexity and contradictions. She is currently an ambassador to Unicef UK, a trustee for the Afghan Childrens Trust and a patron of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank in the UK.
Although Jemima left her studies to marry Imran when he was twice her age, she returned to Bristol to take her degree in English literature and went on to do an MA in Islamic societies and cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Judging by what she has written in the past, Jemima will be much kinder to her in-laws, with whom she was forced to share a house for five years, than to either the late Benazir Bhutto or Musharraf. She is realistic enough to know she will sell many more copies if Surprising Encounters includes a generous element of kiss-and-tell.
THE INTERVIEWER
A sample from Jemimas interview with Pervez Musharraf on February 17, 2008
Much to the justifiable fury of every journalist in Islamabad, he (Musharraf) has now granted me an exclusive half-hour interview despite, or perhaps because of the fact that, I have recently described him as one of the most repressive dictators Pakistan has ever known. Musharraf mentions democracy a great deal. He seems sincere. He is genuinely likeable. But it seems he just cant help himself. You can take the general out of the army but not the army out of the general .
As I leave, he presents me with a clock inscribed from the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It seems an inauspicious gift from a man whose time may be up. He shakes my hand. It will be the saddest day for Pakistan if Benazirs crooked widower is in power by Monday, I say.
As the President walks away, he looks back. At least we part on agreement.
AMIT ROY
The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | Jemima to tell all about Pak <I>Encounters</I>
London, Oct. 10: Jemima Khan is to write a book on Pakistan, where she lived for almost a decade after marrying Imran Khan when she was only 21 and where she later became a critic of General Pervez Musharraf.
The book, provisionally called Surprising Encounters, is being promoted by literary agents A.P. Watt at the Frankfurt Book Fair and will be published in October 2011 by Virago Press, which specialises in feisty women authors.
Although Jemima, now 35 and the mother of two sons by Imran, features regularly in London gossip columns, she has in a sense outgrown both her former husband who has made no headway in Pakistani politics and her on-off actor boyfriend, Hugh Grant, who is now surviving on his past reputation (though his career may yet be revived if he manages to turn in a convincing performance as Lord Mountbatten in Indian Summer, a forthcoming film about Edwinas relationship with Nehru).
In marked contrast, Jemima has grown in maturity and stature. Two years ago she led demonstrations outside Downing Street against Musharrafs military dictatorship when the then Pakistan President was meeting Gordon Brown, and helped ensure no serious harm came to her former husband who had been locked up under a military state of emergency.
Nor will a ghostwriter have to do the work for Jemima, who writes regularly, elegantly and with humour for British newspapers, often about Pakistan. Once, she scooped better-known journalists by securing a celebrated interview with Musharraf the general apparently wanted to meet her to see if she really was as pretty as she appeared in her photographs (she had a lot of fun with him in her interview).
According to A.P. Watt of London, which was founded in 1875 and describes itself as the longest-established literary agency in the world, the book on Pakistan will be an accessible and anecdotal, witty and revealing portrait of a country at the febrile epicentre of world affairs.
The agency elaborates: In this book she revisits the country she got to know in the 1990s, undertaking a journey which begins in Lahore, moves north to Peshawar and Islamabad before heading down to Karachi. Along the way, she encounters a dazzling array of people the ordinary, the infamous and the extraordinary who best illustrate the paradoxes of this country of 165 million people, which encompasses more than a dozen languages, several hundred tribes and is very different from the bearded zealots or military men of the stereotype.
Jemima now lives in London but has remained involved in Pakistan, raising funds after the 2005 earthquake and setting up the Free Pakistan campaign in 2007 to protest the state of emergency during which her ex-husband was incarcerated.
A.P. Watts statement makes it clear Jemima is more than just a pretty face: She was a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. She now writes regularly for the Sunday Times and is a contributing editor for British Vogue. Her writing has also appeared in the Evening Standard, Vanity Fair, Independent and Independent on Sunday.
Jemima will be an outsider able to provide an insiders account: Jemima Goldsmith was just 21 when she married Imran Khan, converted to Islam, began to learn Urdu and moved into his extended family house in Lahore, Pakistan. During the next decade she came to know and love Pakistan, the land of the Pure, in all its bewildering complexity and contradictions. She is currently an ambassador to Unicef UK, a trustee for the Afghan Childrens Trust and a patron of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank in the UK.
Although Jemima left her studies to marry Imran when he was twice her age, she returned to Bristol to take her degree in English literature and went on to do an MA in Islamic societies and cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Judging by what she has written in the past, Jemima will be much kinder to her in-laws, with whom she was forced to share a house for five years, than to either the late Benazir Bhutto or Musharraf. She is realistic enough to know she will sell many more copies if Surprising Encounters includes a generous element of kiss-and-tell.
THE INTERVIEWER
A sample from Jemimas interview with Pervez Musharraf on February 17, 2008
Much to the justifiable fury of every journalist in Islamabad, he (Musharraf) has now granted me an exclusive half-hour interview despite, or perhaps because of the fact that, I have recently described him as one of the most repressive dictators Pakistan has ever known. Musharraf mentions democracy a great deal. He seems sincere. He is genuinely likeable. But it seems he just cant help himself. You can take the general out of the army but not the army out of the general .
As I leave, he presents me with a clock inscribed from the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It seems an inauspicious gift from a man whose time may be up. He shakes my hand. It will be the saddest day for Pakistan if Benazirs crooked widower is in power by Monday, I say.
As the President walks away, he looks back. At least we part on agreement.
