Memoir Master Class: Exploring Craft, Shame, and Meditations On Oversharing with Fatima Bhutto
Memoir Master Class: Exploring Craft, Shame, and Meditations On Oversharing with Fatima Bhutto
1 Session: Sunday, October 4
11:00am-1:00pm ET
Fatima Bhutto
When Fatima Bhutto met a charismatic man who promised her love, healing, and the children she’d always dreamed of, she trusted him—never imagining what would become the toxic, manipulative relationship that held her captive for over a decade. By the spring of 2020, secluded in the English countryside and accompanied by her most loyal companion: Coco, a fiercely protective Jack Russell terrier, Fatima began to question everything, a process that culminated in her most recent memoir, The Hour of the Wolf.
In this master class, Fatima will speak about how she wrote a deeply personal memoir that required her to confront her own shame and meditations on family, desire and longings. The two-hour session will include a lecture on craft, time for questions, and a brief reading list of other works of memoir.
This class has 5 full and 5 partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, September 27.
Fatima Bhutto is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed memoir, The Hour of the Wolf (Simon & Schuster, 2026). Her other books include the novels The Runaways (Viking, 2019), praised as “astute and searing” by Kirkus Reviews, and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Books, 2015), longlisted for Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction books include New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop (Columbia Global Reports, 2019, which argues that the West’s cultural influence is diminishing across the globe. Her first book is Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Nation Books, 2010) which deals with her father’s murder and the Bhutto family's history in Pakistani politics. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. The Guardian wrote, “In clear and unpretentious prose it gives a vivid impression of the brutal and corrupt world of Pakistani power politics, which has resulted in the violent deaths of four members of the Bhutto dynasty in the past 31 years.” Bhutto’s journalism and essays have appeared in New Statesman, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Nation, Literary Hub and elsewhere.
