Ishtiyaq Shukri

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ishtiyaq Shukri is a South African writer known for his novels The Silent Minaret and I See You. The Silent Minaret won the European Union Literary Award in 2004, which launched his writing career. The book explores the global impact of the War on Terror and was inspired by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. His second novel, I See You, continues these themes with a story about an abducted war photographer. He aims to challenge simple, patriotic clichés.

In 2015, Shukri was nominated for the Financial Times Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards but rejected the award, arguing that labeling African writers as “emergent” belittles the global impact of African literature.

He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1997, and his wife is British; they have been married since 1996. In July 2015, he was detained at Heathrow and deported, which he called a sign of the heavy-handed treatment of African migrants at borders.

In 2018 he wrote an open letter to Archbishop Desmond Tutu after Tutu stepped down as an Oxfam ambassador amid a sex scandal, saying he is a survivor of child sexual abuse by priests from the Church of England and asking why Tutu has not fully addressed abuse in his own organization. In 2021 he published a longer piece naming his abusers: Roy Snyman and Keith Thomas.