Tariq Malik was born and educated in Pakistan. He began his professional life by working for twenty years in Kuwait, employed as an industrial quality manager, before emigrating to Canada in 1995. He has continued to work in his adopted field having taken to heart writer author Annie Dillard's advice: "Experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade."

Rainsongs of Kotli is his first book. Short-listed for the North Shore Book Festival in 2006, the book took three years to write. However, he claims his research on the book began during the first Gulf War in 1990, when he ‘washed up on the shores of his hometown, Kotli’ as a war refugee. The five loosely linked stories that comprise the book are partially autobiographical, and partly based on the personal histories of family, close friends,  …infuriating neighbors. The book follows the inner lives and longings of its protagonists over the seasons of a single year. (Excerpts from the book are available under the Fictions link on this site.) He now lives in Vancouver with his wife and two children, hunched over a laptop when he is not at work.

 
The inspiration for his writing comes from the rainforests surrounding the North Shore where he spends his free time hiking and ‘moving to the sound of water’, keenly observing the etchings of time and seasons on the natural environment. He is also continuously peering over his shoulder at the bewildering state of the subcontinent that he has left behind in adopting Canada as his homeland.

The object of his current preoccupation is a historical fiction, a first novel that is set on the North American Westcoast during the period of 1907–1914, the first Vancouver Riots, and the events surrounding the arrival of the Komagata Maru - a watershed incident largely forgotten outside the South Asian community. Chanting Denied Shores is (optimistically) slated for publication in late 2007.

Beyond this book there are other projects in the pipeline: a novel with the working title of The Last Lohar that traces the personal histories of Punjabi migrant workers in the Arabian Gulf and concludes with the first Gulf War; and a sequel to the tentative stories begun with Rainsongs of Kotli.

His writing is heavily influenced by his rereading of the works of the naturalist / paleo-anthropologist / story-teller par excellence, Loren Eiseley; Lyall Watson’s brief foray into fiction with the ground-breaking novel Gifts of Unknown Things; the extended spiritual cogitations of Annie Dillard in For the Time Being; the dazzling early short fictions by Updike; Doctorow’s stellar Ragtime, and Ondaatje’s biographical jazz classic Coming Through Slaughter.

He is also profoundly inspired by theUrdu poetry of Faiz and Ghalib, and his occasional forays into the anthologies of the works by Ted Hughes, Robert Frost and TS Elliot.

In addition to creative writing, he also nurtures a penchant for the progressive Indo-Persian fusion music of Shujaat Ali Khan, Axioms of Choice and Stellamara; the Urdu ghazal; classical Indian music set to raagas Malhaar or Bhairavi, and the melancholic outpourings from Bollywood’s Golden Age.

In anticipating the future he looks forward to the day when Dragon Naturally Speaking will transcribe speech at (even if marginally) > 80% accuracy, and the digital tablet that will decode a fraction of a sleepless writer’s late night scribbles.

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