We are excited to share the cover reveal for IN EXILE: RUPTURE, REUNION, AND MY GRANDMOTHER’S SECRET LIFE by Sadiya Ansari set to be released by House Of Anansi Press on August 13, 2024!
In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left the man, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?
Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi’s life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.
Sadiya Ansari is an award-winning writer and journalist based in Berlin. Her work — including essays, features, Q&As and books reviews — has appeared in the Guardian, Maclean’s, VICE, Refinery29, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Policy Options, Toronto Star, HuffPost Canada, Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest and more.
She has worked as a Professor of Journalism at Centennial College, managing editor of features at Global News, staff editor at Chatelaine and has reported for the Toronto Star, produced TV for CBC News, edited opinion for HuffPost Canada, and covered arts for the Canadian Press. Sadiya is a co-founder of the Canadian Journalists of Colour, a national network of BIPOC journalists. She has served as a judge for the Digital Publishing Awards and the Amnesty International Canada Media Awards.
Sadiya was selected as a 2021 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellow. Her work has also been supported by the International Center for Journalists, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. She holds a Masters of Public Administration from Queen’s University and a Masters of Journalism from the University of British Columbia.
Sadiya is represented by Samantha Haywood.