Tahmima Anam’s fifth novel, Uprising, is a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize.
Show notes:
- Uprising
- The Power of Holding Silence: Making the Workplace Work for Women
- Write Now with Scrivener Episode 62: Erica Wagner, Novelist and Literary Editor
- The 100 best novels of all time – The Guardian
- The Vegetarian by Han Kang
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Tahmima Anam’s fifth novel, Uprising, is a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize.
Tahmima Anam was born in Bangladesh and grew up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok. I asked her what nationality she felt she was. “I had a peripatetic childhood because my father worked for the UN for 15 years while I was growing up. When I was a junior in high school, we returned to Bangladesh. I very much feel like I am a Bangladeshi, that my stories come from Bangladesh, that my politics are geared towards that part of the world. And yet I will always be an outsider because I didn’t grow up there.”
This idea of being an outsider is what drives her writing. “I think that the condition of most writers is that we don’t feel comfortable anywhere. Even a person who has grown up within one community and has had one set of values or one culture. A person who is totally bought into that world will not become the writer of that tribe. It will be somebody who feels like an outsider. I think my own personal journey in relationship to my identity has been to embrace the fact that outsiderness is my home. That is where the creative impulse comes from, is that sense of seeking a home or how I write my way into stories.”
We briefly talked about the weather, as two people in the UK do, it being an early heat wave in the country. Tahmima said, “I was at the Hay Festival last weekend, and I spoke to a few novelists, and we said that all novels set in the contemporary moment must address this issue of the climate crisis because it’s no longer an abstract idea.”
Climate change is a side character in Uprising, which takes place on an island which is a floating brothel. This reminder of the effects of climate change affects how the inhabitants are treated. “The island floods, and they occasionally have to take shelter on the roofs of their huts, which are very flimsy. When there is a cyclone, they are not allowed into the cyclone shelter because they’re sex workers. Eventually, the island will be subsumed by the water. So this kind of sense of daily emergency, of precarity, of uncertainty is something that pervades every aspect of the book.”
Uprising is about this island brothel, in a country where prostitution is legal, but where the women are all trafficked and cannot leave. A girl named Kusum comes to the island and is seen as a sort of savior by the children, who are the ones telling the story. “When Kusum arrives, she’s so different from the other women on the island that they believe that she’s been sent to save them. Kusum herself rejects this trope. At first, she’s in it for herself. She wants to get off the island. She doesn’t care about the women. It’s only when she realizes that she’s not going to get off the island without the rest of them that she starts to come up with this idea of a strike.”
The novel is inspired by the island Banishanta in Bangladesh, which was the subject of a number of articles in the past, including The Sinking Brothel. Tahmima says that her novel is loosely based on that island, and that she visited the island, “but not until after I had finished writing the book. I’d heard about the island, and I wanted to set a novel there. But I knew that if I visited, it would be very hard to disconnect the real people that I met there from my characters. It was very important to me that the characters stood on their own. When I had finished the novel, I went to the island. There were some almost shocking parallels between what I had written, things that I could never have known, that turned out to be true. There were also some significant differences. I’m very glad that I made that decision, because the novel is an act of imagination. It’s not based on real characters, but it is certainly inspired by that very place.”
Tahmima has been using Scrivener since 2010, when she wrote her second novel The Good Muslim, and has used it for every book since then. “I found it enormously useful because, in that novel, I was going between the points of view of two different characters. It made it much easier for me to keep track of the two different voices rather than have one long document or two documents that I would try to stitch together.”
Tahmima also pointed out how useful the Binder is, which shows the structure of her books. “It’s really useful to be able to see it all [in the Binder]. You have a sense of the shape of your book. I can look on the left side and see that this section has three chapters, and this section has ten. That’s not a good balance. Having a kind of visual sense of the different sections is also extremely helpful.”
One of the blurbs on Uprising is from Salman Rushdie, who calls the novel “A miracle.” Tahmima said, “It was a huge honor for me. In fact, I was asked to name my 10 best novels of all time, and Midnight’s Children was at the top of the list. He’s been a huge hero of mine and a person I’ve long admired.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.