ItalianoFatima Bhutto, a Pakistani writer and spokeswoman of justice and liberty through art, will be the hosting lady of the third edition of the Festival A Window on the World, Images from Reality. Fatima, the icon of the 2017 edition, published her first book, a volume of poetry entitled Whispers of the Desert (Oxford University Press), at the age of 15. Fatima began her writing career with a weekly column for Jang, Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper, and the English sister paper The News International, which included her written diaries from Teheran, Iran, Cuba and Lebanon during the 2006 summer war. Furthermore, Fatima has published a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, an non-fiction essay about the Pakistani politics and her family entitled Songs of Blood and Sword (Jonathan Cape) and the novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin) which was long listed for the Bailey’s Prize in 2014 and won the Prix de la Romanciere in 2014. Her books have appeared in Italian: Canzioni di sangue in 2011 and L’ombra della luna crescente in 2013.
Recently, Fatima Bhutto has been working on the development of a screenplay based on her novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon together with Michael Radford, the director of Il Postino.