‘I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth’

Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, In the Light of What We Know, is already the literary event of the year (reviewed in Open, ‘A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, 23 June 2014). Born in Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, Rahman has worked as an investment banker and human rights lawyer. The novelist in conversation with S Prasannarajan, editor, Open magazine