Shamsie wrote her first novel,
In the City by the Sea, while still in college, and it was published in 1998 when she was 25. It was shortlisted for the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, Both
Kartography and Shamsie's next novel,
Broken Verses (2005), have won the
Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. and won an
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction.
A God in Every Stone (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015
Walter Scott Prize and for the Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction. According to
Maya Jaggi's review in
The Guardian: "Through its succession of seemingly disparate, acutely observed worlds, Burnt Shadows reveals the impact of shared histories, hinting at larger tragedies through individual loss." Shamsie's seventh novel,
Home Fire, described by the
BBC as a "powerful story of the complexities of love, family and state in wartime", was longlisted for the 2017
Booker Prize, shortlisted for the
International Dublin Literary Award, and in 2018 won the
Women's Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of the non-fiction work
Offence: The Muslim Case (
Seagull Books, 2009). In 2009, Shamsie donated the short story "The Desert Torso" to
Oxfam's
Ox-Tales project – four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the
Air collection. She attended the 2011
Jaipur Literature Festival, where she spoke about her style of writing. She participated in the
Bush Theatre's 2011 project
Sixty-Six Books, with a piece based on a book of the
King James Bible. Shamsie was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2011. In 2013, she was included in the
Granta list of 20 best young British writers. She has contributed to such international events as the Cleveland Humanities Festival and is a patron of the Manchester Literature Festival. In 2017, she joined the
Manchester Centre for New Writing, where she is Professor of Creative Writing. She delivered the 2018
Orwell Lecture at
University College London, with the title "Unbecoming British: citizenship, migration and the transformation of rights into privileges". In 2021, Shamsie was a judge for the
Goldsmiths Prize, alongside
Nell Stevens,
Fred D'Aguiar and
Johanna Thomas-Corr. ==Personal life==