Jamaluddin Aram

Jamaluddin Aram is an Afghan-Canadian writer and documentary filmmaker. His debut novel, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday (2023), won the 2024 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction. His short story "This Hard Easy Life" was a finalist for the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.

Early life and education

Aram was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. He left Afghanistan in 2013 and went to Union College in Schenectady, New York. He graduated in 2017 after studying English and history. He later settled in Toronto.

Career

Film

In 2009, Aram took part in a documentary filmmaking workshop run by Ateliers Varan in Kabul. During the workshop, he directed My Teacher Is a Shopkeeper, a documentary about a primary-school teacher who also works as a shopkeeper.

Aram later worked as an associate producer on the short film Buzkashi Boys. The film was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 85th Academy Awards, with the nomination credited to director Sam French and producer Ariel Nasr.

Writing

Aram's writing has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The New Quarterly and The Globe and Mail.

In 2020, his short story "This Hard Easy Life" was one of three finalists in the short-fiction category of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. The same year, he was a mentee of novelist Michael Christie through the Writers' Trust Mentorship program.

Aram's debut novel, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday, was published by Scribner Canada on June 6, 2023. Set in Kabul's Wazirabad neighbourhood during the civil war of the early 1990s, the novel follows the lives of residents as fighting continues around them.

Rudi Heinrich, writing in The Markaz Review, noted the contrast between the continuing street battles and the characters' everyday concerns. In a review for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, Shaharzad Akbar discussed the novel's nonlinear structure and its use of Persian poetry, proverbs, gossip, predictions and dreams. Nathan Whitlock also discussed the novel in The Walrus in an essay about Canadian fiction concerning Afghanistan.

In June 2024, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction.

Aram's essay collection The Blood of Things: A Love Letter to Afghanistan is scheduled for publication by McClelland & Stewart on September 15, 2026.

Works

• Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday (Scribner Canada, 2023)
• The Blood of Things: A Love Letter to Afghanistan (McClelland & Stewart, forthcoming 2026)