[8] In the Light of What We Know, a novel, received plaudits internationally, earning high praise from literary critics such as James Wood,[9] Joyce Carol Oates,[10] Louise Adler,[11] and Amitava Kumar.

When I was on the road at literary festivals promoting my novel, more than once I was told I really ought to meet [novelists] Mohsin Hamid or Kamila Shamsie.

I’m not naive: liberal elites see race before class and are blind to the gulf between my background and the highly privileged one of the likes of Hamid, who attended Aitchison College, Pakistan’s Eton.

[22] In August 2015, Rahman was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize, previous winners of which include E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, J. M. Coetzee and Iris Murdoch.

He was an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and was invited to a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

[27] He has also spoken at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, NYU, London School of Economics, Oxford University, and at numerous literary festivals around the world.

[30] In 2017 Rahman received an honorary doctorate from Southern New Hampshire University, where he subsequently spent a year as a visiting professor.