At 13, Aslam published his first short story in
Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper. His 1993 debut novel,
Season of the Rainbirds, set in rural Pakistan, won the
Betty Trask and the
Author's Club First Novel Award.
Salman Rushdie described it as 'One of the most impressive first novels of the recent years'. His next novel, 2004's
Maps for Lost Lovers, is set in the midst of an
immigrant Pakistani community in an English town in the north. The novel took him more than a decade to complete and won the
Encore Award and
Kiriyama Prize. It was long-listed for the
Man Booker Prize. Aslam's third novel,
The Wasted Vigil, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 2008. It is set in
Afghanistan. He travelled to Afghanistan during the writing of the book; but had never visited the country before writing the first draft. On 11 February 2011, it was short-listed for the Warwick Prize for Writing Aslam's fourth novel is ''
The Blind Man's Garden'' (2013). It is set in Western Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan and looks at the
war on terror through the eyes of local, Islamist characters. It contains also a love story loosely based on the traditional Punjabi romance of
Heer Ranjha. The Blind Man's Garden was shortlisted for the
Ondaatje Prize 2014, which is given by the
Royal Society of Literature. He has mentioned
Vasko Popa,
Ivan V. Lalić,
Czesław Miłosz,
Wisława Szymborska,
Herman Melville,
John Berger,
VS Naipaul,
Michael Ondaatje, and
Bruno Schulz. He was made a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2012. ==Bibliography==