Early and personal life Peer was born in
Seer Hamdan area of south Kashmir’s
Anantnag district of the erstwhile
Indian state of
Jammu and Kashmir into a
Kashmiri Muslim family. He did his early schooling from
Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Aishmuqam, an educational institution located near the city of
Anantnag, and attended
Aligarh Muslim University as well as the
University of Delhi for higher education in the fields of
political science and
law, respectively. Peer also attended the
Graduate School of Journalism at
Columbia University in the
United States. Peer's father is a retired officer of the
Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service. He married
Ananya Vajpeyi—a
Delhi-based academician of
Hindu–Sikh background—in 2013, following an eight-year-long
courtship.
Career Peer started his career as a reporter at
Rediff and
Tehelka. In his early career he was based in
Delhi. He has worked as an Assistant Editor at
Foreign Affairs and was a Fellow at Open Society Institute, New York. He was a Roving Editor at
The Hindu. He has written extensively on South Asian politics for
Granta,
Foreign Affairs,
The Guardian,
FT Magazine,
The New Yorker,
The National and
The Caravan. He is the author of
Curfewed Night, an eyewitness account of the
Kashmir conflict, which won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by
The Economist and
The New Yorker. Peer ran the "India Ink" blog on the digital edition of
The New York Times. Peer was the script writer along with
Vishal Bhardwaj for the 2014
Bollywood film
Haider, in which he also made a special appearance. He is also known for his literary pieces. His open letter to Indians under the title of "Letter to an Unknown Indian" started a literary debate on the Kashmir dispute. In 2025, Peer's reporting on
migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic was adapted into the film
Homebound, directed by
Neeraj Ghaywan. The film premiered at the
2025 Cannes Film Festival. ==See also==