Basharat Peer's 'Haider' and 'Curfewed Nights' lifts the veil on conflict in Kashmir

Basharat Peer is the author of Curfewed Nights, a memoir on the conflict in Kashmir. It won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker. A journalist by profession, Peer was born and attended school in the valley of Kashmir, and is currently based  in New York.  He studied Political Science at Aligarh Muslim University and Journalism at Columbia University.

He began his career as a reporter at Rediff and Tehelka. His work has appeared in Granta, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, FT Magazine, The New Yorker, The National and The Caravan.

Current Work: His most recent work is the Bollywood production, Haider. Peer wrote the script of Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest film Haider which is based on William Shakespeare's Hamlet  as well as Curfewed Nights and is set in Kashmir in the mid-1990s. The film was widely praised by the critics and audience alike for its unflinching and realistic take on the Kashmir conflict, which till then had almost always been shown in a filtered way.

The Telegraph had this to say about Peer and his book: Curfewed Night is an exceptional personal account of the conflict. Peer has a superb feel for language and incident. Words such as “frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture,” he tells us, formed the lexicon of his childhood.

Quirky Fact: Peer had a small cameo in Haider. Based on a Akhtar Mohiuddin's short story, New Disease, the scene is about a man who every time he comes to a door, any door,  stops and waits expecting a frisking or security check. Such was the insecurity in Kashmir.