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Ms Rosie Dastgir

Positions held:
  • Associate Lecturer A, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I am a writer and novelist, born in England to a Pakistani father and an English mother.  I hold a BA degree in English from Oxford University, and an MFA in Film Production from New York University. My debut novel, A Small Fortune, is published by Riverhead (USA), Quercus (UK), and Editions Bourgois (France). It was a runner up for the Readers’ Prize at the the Cognac Literature Festival and was awarded the Perveen Shakir Fiction prize in Pakistan after its launch at the Lahore Literature Festival.
     
    My short fiction has been published by Picador India, Dahlia Books, Dear Damsels, Spitalfields Life and elsewhere, and I have also written screenplays and a stage play that was showcased at the Arcola PlayWrought Festival in 2014. My nonfiction writing has appeared in FT Weekend, New York Times Magazine, Prospect, and Spitalfields Life, and I have written and presented a documentary, The Art of Home, for BBC Radio 4, as well as a short drama for BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. My current work in progress, Tokyo Time, is a short hybrid memoir based around photographs taken during the pandemic in Japan.  In 2023 the project was granted funding from the Society of Authors, and also the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for research, writing and development. 

    Web profiles

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Contemporary literary fiction
    • Ecofiction
    • Memoir
    • Experimental creative nonfiction
    • Health and Humanities
    • Short fiction

    Research overview

    My current research is focused upon two new projects: the first, a short hybrid novel, set in the English countryside in a speculative present that tells the story of two young girls posing as sisters evacuated to the countryside during an unspecified state of emergency. The story takes place across borders in unnamed countries – Turkey, Switzerland, the USA – and is a narrative of escape and otherness pitched against the backdrop of English nationalism and its calamitous nostalgia. 
     
    'Tokyo Time' is a memoir in progress.  My research takes the film ‘Calendar’ by Atom Egoyan, as a provocation and catalyst for a short hybrid memoir around a grid of Instagram photos that I took when I ended up stranded in Tokyo during the first phase of the pandemic in 2020. Drawing upon the grid as an Oulipian constraint, I use the photos as a structure for a series of writings that tesselate into a whole.

    Research Centres and Institutes