Javed afridi biography of william shakespeare

It is standard fare to read Shakespeare at high school or so I thought – but these days high school fryst vatten more about contemporary fiction. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit Westis standard fare in the US public school curriculum. Even my twelve-year-old son has even been exposed to the Somalian civil war and the generation of lost boys through A Long Walk to Water. Fiction teaches us empathy and within a few pages of narrative storytelling, one can imagine oneself in a nation far away or in places we will never visit – for they exist in the writer’s imagination.

For this reason, it is wonderful to read Maggie O Farrell’s book Hamnetwhich deservedly won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in The Irish author discovered that Shakespeare actually had a son named Hamnet who died when he was eleven in , a few years before he wrote Hamlet. She was intrigued enough about it to the point where a literary footnote in Shakespeare’s autobiography becomes a fully fledged novel which highlights tangentially so m

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