Azhar Abidi

Azhar Ali Abidi
Born	1968 Wah, Pakistan
Occupation(s)	Writer, translator
Years active	2000s–present
Known for	Passarola Rising, Twilight

Azhar Ali Abidi (born 1968 in Wah, Pakistan) is a Pakistani Australian writer and translator. After completing his education in Pakistan, he pursued electrical engineering at Imperial College London and later obtained an MBA from the University of Melbourne. He relocated to Australia in 1994 and currently lives in Melbourne.

Career

Abidi’s literary portfolio includes translations, travel writings, and short fiction, notably the Borgesian piece The Secret History of the Flying Carpet, which presents a fictional narrative as an academic essay. His first novel, Passarola Rising (2006), was released by Viking Penguin across Australia, the United States, Canada, and India, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. The story is set in eighteenth-century Europe and fictionalizes the life of Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a Brazilian priest and early aviation innovator who constructed a flying vessel but encountered opposition from the Inquisition. Through a traditional adventure tale, the novel offers a critique of the scientific materialism prevalent during the European Enlightenment. Passarola Rising earned a place on the shortlist for the 2006 Melbourne Literature Prize.

His follow-up novel, Twilight (2008), delves into domestic realism within 1980s Pakistan. It centers on an elderly matriarch grappling with both family dynamics and societal shifts amid a period of unrest. Published by Text Publishing in Australia and Viking Penguin in the US and India, it appeared under the title The House of Bilqis (2009) in the United States.

In 2010, Abidi authored The Road to Chitral for Granta Online, a travelogue reflecting on conflict in Pakistan’s Chitral area.

His short story When the Angel Comes is set against the backdrop of post-1979 Islamic Revolution Iran, portraying a diplomat caught in the turmoil following the Shah’s exile and subsequent regime purges.

Bibliography

Novels

• Passarola Rising (2006)
• La maquina de volar (2008) , 9788483650509
• Twilight (2008) (reissued in US as The House of Bilqis) (2009)
• La casa degli amori sognati (2010)
• Il mio matrimonio pakistano (2011)

Translations

• "Old Croc" - short story by Hasan Manzar (Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol 16, 2001)
• "The Fall of Baghdad" - essay by Azeem Beg Chughtai (Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol 18, 2003)

Short Stories/Essays

• "Secret History of the Flying Carpet", Meanjin, Vol 63, No 2, 2004 (reissued in US in Southwest Review, Vol 91, No 1, 2006)
• "Rosa", Words Without Borders, April 2006
• "A Passage to the Past", The Age, June 2009
• "Road to Chitral", Granta, September 2010
• "When the Angel Comes", Meanjin, 2018

Interviews

• The Australian interview
• The Age feature
• The Dawn interview
• Wall Street Journal on emigrant experience