Author Tahmima Anam has published her fourth novel, The Startup Wife. Anam previously wrote a much lauded trilogy of novels set during and after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war. The Startup Wife represents a departure from these themes, as she draws from her experiences as a woman in the tech industry.
The book has appeared as a Best Book of 2021 in the Observer, Cosmopolitan, Stylist and the Daily Mail. Anam has also won the Best First Book of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes and the O. Henry Award.
Tahmima Anam: a successful career
Anam published her first novel A Golden Age in 2007. The novel follows a widow separated from her family during the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. Inspired by her parents who were freedom fighters in the war, the novel won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Before writing, Anam had stayed in Bangladesh for two years interviewing hundreds of war-fighters for her postgraduate research.
Her second novel The Good Muslim (2011), takes the reader forward to the next generation. It examines the consequences of war and the process of nation-building, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Anam also won the O. Henry Award for a short story titled Garments. That same year she became a judge for the distinguished Man Booker International Prize 2016.
Anam published her third novel of the trilogy The Bones of Grace in 2016. In the time it took to write the book, she appeared on Granta’s prestigious list of 40 best young British novelists. She then became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature after its publication. Anam also writes op-eds for the New York Times, The Guardian and The New Statesman. She currently sits on the board of her husband’s music tech company ROLI.
Tahmima Anam: from academic to creative writing
Born in Dakha, Anam’s parents were deeply involved in the Bangladeshi struggle for independence. At the age of two, her father’s job at the UN took her to Paris, New York and then Bangkok. At fifteen she moved back to Bangladesh with her family as her father started a newspaper. Two years later, she won a scholarship to liberal arts college Mount Holyoke in rural Massachusetts.
Upon graduation, Anam took up a PHD at Harvard in Social Anthropology. The project: an oral history of the Bangladesh War that would provide the research for her first novel. She completed it in 2005 and later studied a Masters in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Anam met her current husband Roland O. Lamb at Harvard University, with whom she has a son. Lamb acts as the CEO of a music tech company and has invented a new kind of electronic keyboard. Anam draws from her experience of sitting on the board for the startup in her latest novel.
“The Startup Wife” by Tahmima Anam
Anam’s fourth novel The Startup Wife follows the story of Cyrus and Asha, who co-found a social media platform that devises secular ceremonies for non-religious people. Asha comes up with the idea, but Cyrus takes the credit for it and becomes the genius face of the company. “I think the tech world promotes the idea of the male visionary,” she says, nodding to the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
The novel partly comes out of her experience of being a tech outsider. Anam did not expect to be so enmeshed in the tech world. “My husband and I were going to be academics. I mean, I was going to write novels and he was going to be a professor of Chinese philosophy,” she says. Then her husband invented an app and launched his own music tech company.
A significant departure from her previous work, and referred to as a “darkly funny satire” by the Guardian, Anam originally wanted to use a pseudonym for the book. But there are still threads that connect it to her other work. Anam’s books are concerned with the corrupting force of ideology. Where in the Good Muslim she took aim at the power of religion, here she focuses her sights on tech and the harmful role social media plays in society.
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