Zia Haider Rahman, Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow and Southern New Hampshire University Fellow, spent his fellowship working on a memoir and on a novel exploring the rise of the algorithm in shaping a person’s world. He is also developing a technology project to map the world’s elites. His first novel, In the Light of What We Know (FSG, 2014), was published to international critical acclaim and won the prestigious James Tait Black Prize, previous winners of which include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer, and Cormac McCarthy. He is a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, a senior fellow at the Kreisky Forum, Vienna, a 2018 Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting professor in SNHU’s MFA in fiction & non-fiction. Along with Adam Gopnik, John Gray, and others, he is a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s “Point of View.” In his varied career, he has worked as an international human rights lawyer and anti-corruption activist, as a lawyer advising financial institutions on regulation, and, briefly, as a derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs. He was educated at Oxford, Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities.
