Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto at a book launch at SOAS in London

Fatima Bhutto , Urdu فاطمہ بھٹو, (born May 29, 1982 in Kabul ) is a Pakistani journalist and writer.

Life

Fatima Bhutto was born to Murtaza Bhutto and an Afghan woman in Kabul, where her father had fled from the Zia-ul-Haq military regime . Her parents divorced three years later, and her father settled in Syria and married her stepmother, the ballet instructor Ghinwa Bhutto. She is the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the niece of Benazir Bhutto . Her father returned to Pakistan after the end of military rule in 1993 and fell apart with his sister Benazir. In 1996 he was shot dead in front of his house in Karachi during a police operation . Fatima Bhutto and her mother believe that Benazir and her husband Asif Ali Zardari had a hand in this. She wrote her master's thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on the resistance movement against Zia's military regime.

Bhutto lives and works in Karachi.

activities

At the age of 15, Bhutto published her first book, a volume of poetry entitled Whispers of the desert . Her second book was a collection of stories from victims of the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 . In 2010 she described the story of her family from her point of view in the book Songs of blood and sword. Her next book, The Shadows of the crescent Moon , was nominated for the 2014 Women's Prize for Fiction . In 2015 she published the e-book “Democracy”, which describes the planning of a coup d'état; in her novel The Runaways , published in autumn 2018, she tells the fictional story of three young people who join an armed Islamist organization in Iraq. She also comments on political issues in Pakistan in articles and interviews. Although her mother formed a split from the PPP and would like to see her as the heir to Bhutto's legacy, she does not seek an active political role. She justifies this with the fact that politics in Pakistan has degenerated into a soap opera through the role of family clans , which do not take into account the real problems of the country.