Biography
Mamoon Chowdry was born and raised in England, the son of immigrants from Pakistan, and moved to the United States in 1999. He has spent his working life inside large technology systems in finance and healthcare, work that left him thinking about the people on the other side of the process.
He is drawn to the small, unremarkable moments that turn out to hold everything: the food prepared before a child comes home, a familiar sound in the next room, the ordinary belief that the people we love will still be there tomorrow. The Names He Gave Me is his debut novel. He lives in Massachusetts.
Why he wrote this book
“I am an ordinary father. I wrote this book because one evening I could not stop the thought - what if it were us?”
The novel grew from that question. Not somewhere distant, but inside an ordinary Massachusetts home. Not through abstract politics, but through the sounds and habits of one family whose life feels permanent until it does not.
“I used to walk through that sound without hearing it. I thought it was just there. It’s not just there. It’s everything.”
For interviews and events
Mamoon is available for selected book club visits, library conversations, podcasts and interviews about literary fiction, family, belonging, memory, the ethics of imagined futures, and the experience of writing a first novel.