Tahmima Anam '97

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After Tahmima Anam ’97 graduated from Mount Holyoke with a double major in anthropology and South Asian studies, she began graduate school at Harvard. Ten years later, she’d completed her Ph.D. in social anthropology—
and also earned an M.A. in creative writing, published her first novel, and penned articles and op-eds for the New York Times, the New Statesman, and other publications.

Anam’s career transition from anthropology to creative writing is not unusual for Mount Holyoke graduates. Like her, many discover Mount Holyoke’s liberal arts curriculum prepares them for more than a narrowly defined career; it gives them the intellectual flexibility to do whatever they want to do. “Mount Holyoke gave me the gift of intellectual rigor,” Anam says. “Before coming to Mount Holyoke, I wasn’t yet focused. After Mount Holyoke, I took myself seriously as an intellectual and as an ambitious, thinking person.”

Her new novel, A Golden Age, has been garnering enthusiastic critical attention. According to the New York Times, in Anam’s historical novel “history itself becomes an animating force.” Set during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, the book, the first of a planned trilogy, has “a taut, electric air.”

As part of her graduate work at Harvard, Anam spent two years in Bangladesh, interviewing people who’d lived through the war. This research ultimately led to her novel, when she realized that the experiences of the people she’d interviewed might best be told in a work of fiction.

So, while wrapping up her Ph.D. at Harvard, Anam also completed an M.A. in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Then, thanks to a writing fellowship from the Arts Council of England, as well as a Bardwell Memorial Fellowship from Mount Holyoke’s Alumnae Association, she devoted a year to writing. The end result was a book contract and the publication in 2007 of A Golden Age.

While at Mount Holyoke, Anam discovered that the Pioneer Valley and the Five Colleges are home to a vibrant cultural and intellectual community. “There were always good opportunities to meet the many interesting people coming through the valley,” she says. One of those was the Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, a guest artist whose writing course Anam took during her sophomore year.

Anam gained something at Mount Holyoke that she hadn’t yet acquired while growing up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok—a strong sense of who she was. “Mount Holyoke is a place where you can discover who you want to be and what you want to do,” she says. “It’s not possible to graduate without having found one’s place in the world.”