AUTHOR · WASHIGTON, DC
I am an author
based in suburban
Washington, DC.
To paraphrase Rumi, I believe in momentous fiction that seeks the marrow and throws the bones to the dogs.
I write about the triumph of humanity in the face of affliction.
Way of the
World
A NOVEL · 92,000 WORDS
I have completed my next novel, Way of the World, a portrait of a queer and biracial man in antebellum South Carolina.
The son of a Lowcountry plantation owner and his mistress, an enslaved Gullah woman, Essex Abbot, 19, lives a sheltered life with his father Reverend Knox Abbot on the Folly Plantation until, at a meeting of wealthy planters, a planter notices their uncanny resemblance, and the planters mock Reverend Abbot who denies that Essex is his son. Reverend Abbot sends Essex to the cotton fields where Essex faces the realities of slavery and orchestrates an audacious escape plot to Africa.
At the same time, Essex struggles with his attraction to both men and women, at last falling in love with Rose, a white, well-born, married woman who works for the Underground Railroad. Now, on the brink of escape, Essex must choose between true freedom in Africa or a true and perilous love in antebellum South Carolina.
Set among the Gullah in the 1840s South Carolina Sea Islands, Way of the World might be described as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man meets Exodus — and should appeal to readers of Clay Cane's Burn Down Master's House (Defina, 2026) and Monica Ali's Love Marriage (Virago, 2022).
DEBUT NOVEL · SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2003
Night Journey
A finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. A blistering coming-of-age debut about a young Black boxer's pursuit of meaning, survival, and grace.
BIOGRAPHY
Murad Kalam
My first novel, Night Journey (Simon & Schuster, 2003), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. I have won an O. Henry Award, and my essays and fiction have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Best American Travel Writing.
I studied creative writing at Harvard College with Jamaica Kincaid and Robert Cohen. I won a creative writing Fulbright Scholarship to Egypt. A Bread Loaf fellow, I have taught at Warren-Wilson and the University of Maryland.
— PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FINALIST
— O. HENRY AWARD WINNER
— FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR, EGYPT
— BREAD LOAF FELLOW
PRAISE FOR NIGHT JOURNEY
"Invisible Man and Native Son provide the key for Kalam's music… Night Journey holds its own… beautiful… a confident, poetic novel… resonates like a dream."
— THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Kalam's writing, which has a fluid precision… subtly narrates the harrowing and complex realities of many American black men at the end of the twentieth century — their poverty, their pain, their determination to survive."
— THE WASHINGTON POST
"A blistering coming-of-age debut."
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY