Dr Yasmin Khan

Dr Yasmin Khan is University Lecturer in 18th to early 20th century British History at the University of Oxford. She has a PhD on the History of the British Empire from Oxford University and has taught at the Edinburgh University and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, The Great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan, won the Gladstone Prize for History from the Royal Historical Society. Dr Khan has written for the New Statesman and Guardian and appeared on BBC radio and television, and is an editor of History Workshop Journal and a trustee of the Charles Wallace India Trust.

Forthcoming publication OVERLAND - Head of Zeus - July 2024

London, 1970
Joyce, fresh out of secretarial college, answers an ad in the local paper for a fellow traveller needed to fill a car going on the hippy trail. Arriving at Freddie's Notting Hill townhouse, Joyce already feels a world away from the suburban semi she grew up in. She's desperate to escape the stifling life she can see mapped out for her - job, boyfriend, marriage, kids - and the long-haired, dope-smoking Freddie looks like he can show her an alternative path.

Together with Freddie's best friend from boarding school, Anton, the three agree to travel overland from London to Kathmandu. But their initial excitement soon turns to fear when Freddie's experimentations push his friendship with Anton to the extreme, with devastating consequences for everyone.

Overland is a novel about youth, privilege, class and the sharp echoes of British imperialism from one of the most exciting new voices in literary fiction.

Praise for OVERLAND

'A dazzler of a novel, a road-trip novel to end all road-trip novels... so wise about the beautiful dream that is youth and so honest about what happens when the dream ends.' Junot Díaz

'In a pitch-perfect act of ventriloquism, Yasmin Khan's gripping second novel evokes the spirit of a vanishing time seen through the eyes of her spiky white anti-heroine Joyce. OVERLAND is a brilliant domestic tragedy played out along the dangerous thrills of the grand trunk road, and a biting critique of the orientalist, gender and class attitudes that shape Britain today. I loved it.' Preti Taneja

Latest publication EDGWARE ROAD - Head of Zeus - March 2022
As Yasmin Cordery Khan

1981. Khalid Quraishi is one of the lucky ones. He works nights in the glitzy West End, and comes home every morning to his beautiful wife and daughter. He's a world away from Karachi and the family he left behind.

But Khalid likes to gamble, and he likes to win. Twenty pounds on the fruit machine, fifty on a sure-thing horse, a thousand on an investment that seems certain to pay out. Now he's been offered a huge opportunity, a chance to get in early with a new bank, and it looks like he'll finally have his big win.

2003. Alia Quraishi doesn't really remember her dad. After her parents' divorce she hardly saw him, and her mum refuses to talk about her charming ex-husband. So, when he died in what the police wrote off as a sad accident, Alia had no reason to believe there was more going on.

Now almost twenty years have passed and she's tired of only understanding half of who she is. Her dad's death alone and miles from his west London stomping ground doesn't add up with the man she knew. If she's going to find out the truth about her father – and learn about the other half of herself – Alia is going to have to visit his home, a place she's never been, and connect with a family that feel more like strangers.

Praise for EDGWARE ROAD

'Part family mystery, part immigrant hustle, EDGWARE ROAD is a complete tour de force. Khan calls up all the ghosts that prowl between children and their parents, between immigrants and their homelands, between our dreams of wealth and our hunger for love, and exorcises them with prose so lapidary and understanding so vast Khan’s novel is like unto a blessing.' Junot Díaz

'At a time when travelling is almost impossible, this beautiful novel transported me. An elegant and moving book from a highly promising new voice in fiction.' Sathnam Sanghera

'A brilliant, intriguing novel about identity and family. The smells and sounds of 1980s London leap from the page and the characters feel so real that I can hardly believe they're not. An absorbing debut.' Louise Hare, author of This Lovely City

'Set between Karachi and London and 1981 and 2003, this is a book for readers of Bernardine Evaristo and Zadie Smith.' Vogue

'Edgware Road is an incredibly accomplished debut.'  Adele Parks, Platinum Magazine

Praise for THE RAJ AT WAR: A People's History of India's Second World War

'Superlative … As Yasmin Khan brilliantly demonstrates in her path-breaking study, The Raj at War, what changed everything was the Second World War. The Raj at War breaks new ground on almost every page. Written in beautifully polished and often moving prose, Khan’s book is the first detailed study. It succeeds brilliantly. Her work has the detailed research, economic rigour and theoretical superstructure of heavyweight academic history; yet it also has the narrative momentum, prose style and humanistic and biographical insights of a more literary work.' William Dalrymple, Spectator

'Wonderfully detailed and original … Khan achieves almost complete success: The Raj at War is a striking example of people’s history, packed with anecdotes, memories and information about a shared but largely unwritten global past.' Patrick French, Guardian

'In The Raj at War, Yasmin Khan, author of the prize-winning The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan, balances analysis, history and human compassion in a narrative that leaves one shaken.' Juliet Nicolson, Daily Telegraph 5*

'Splendid … Khan's richly readable book takes apart and rewrites the conventional narratives of imperial historians … Democratic in her approach and largely suspicious of grand narratives, Khan tells her stories from the ground upwards … her chronicle is, in the main, tragic in this seminal and timely book.' Independent

'Her new work makes salutary but unpalatable fare for any remotely sensitive modern British reader … tells a host of stories about India’s wartime travails that should be known to a wider western audience.' Max Hastings, Sunday Times

'Frequently illuminating.' Independent 

'[Dr Khan] brings forensic clarity and even-handed sensitivity to the experience of British India and its population. The result is a narrative that is as riotous with colour as the markets and railway stations around my home in Delhi.' Jason Burke, Observer

'In The Raj at War, Yasmin Khan tells the story of the Indian experience of the crisis that finally did for that world. Like all Indian stories, it is complex and contradictory, but she shows convincingly how Indians could no longer be fooled, or fool themselves, that the British presence was either benign or irreversible.' Guardian, History Books of the Year

'The value of Yasmin Khan’s fine book is to tell us something of what the war did to India.' Financial Times

'A big picture account, flecked with minute sociological detail, of both Indians on the home front and Indian soldiers on the battlefield, showing how the war transformed nearly every part of Indian society…her attention to ordinary men and women, labourers, sepoys, coolies, factotums in the giant machinery of war, give her book a powerful depth and resonance.' The National

Praise for THE GREAT PARTITION: THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN

*Winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize.*

'Yasmin Khan, a British historian, has written a riveting book on this terrible story. It is unusual for two reasons. It is composed with flair, quite unlike the dense, academic plodding that modern Indian history usually delivers. Second, it turns the spotlight away from the self-posturing in the British viceroy's palace and the well-documented political wrangling between Congress and the Muslim League leaders. Instead, it focuses on a broader canvas that leads the reader through the confusion, the uncertainties, the fear and eventually the horror faced by those who were soon to become citizens of the two new states, India and Pakistan.' The Economist

'...intelligent and empathetic...Most historians like to apportion blame among the leading players, British and Indian, for the disaster that occurred. Yasmin Khan is not interested in doing so. Nor does she give time to the simplistic and oft-repeated theory that partition was the result of Britain's alleged policy of 'divide and rule'. The author's main interest is in the experience of partition, how people thought of it and it affected them.' David Gilmour, Literary Review

'Until now, writes Yasmin Khan in THE GREAT PARTITION, historians have tended either to trace the suffering of the victims on their epic journeys, or to concentrate on political intrigue in New Delhi. But Khan's important new book marries these two approaches, showing the relationship between the human and the political.' BBC History Magazine

'...rather than dwelling on New Delhi's political intrigue [Khan's] insightful book focuses on the oft-ignored social undercurrents that contributed to the mass violence.' Tarquin Hall, Sunday Times

'...an elegant, scholarly analysis of the chaotic severing of two Pakistans (now Pakistan and Bangladesh) from India in 1947. Khan's book is splendidly researched, and she has an eye for illuminating details of how Partition affected everyday lives.' Alex von Tunzelmann, Daily Telegraph

'After independence, refugees made up almost half the population of Lahore, and almost a third of Delhi. Many were badly traumatised; some went mad. One of Khan's many achievements in this powerful book is to link this terrible suffering to the blueprint for Partition, 'loftily imposed from above'. She seethes with anger at the British manner of leaving the sub-continent, 'rushed and inadequately thought out'. She condemns the decision to send British troops home and to shift responsibility for peace-keeping to the nascent governments, before they had even begun to function.' Susan Williams, Independent

'Khan's angry, unsparing analysis of catastrophe is provocative and painful." The Times "[A] highly intelligent and moving reappraisal of the Partition, weaving together stories of everyday life with political analysis.' Soumya Bhattacharya, Observer