Omer Aziz

Photograph by Amr Jayousi

About The Author

Omer Aziz is a lawyer, writer, and former foreign policy advisor in the administration of the Canadian Prime Minister. He was born to working-class parents of Pakistani origin in Toronto, Canada, and with the help of scholarships, became the first in his family to go to college in the West, later studying in Paris, at Cambridge University, and Yale Law School. Aziz has clerked for the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria and served as a foreign policy advisor in the government of Justin Trudeau. He has held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell and has written for The New York TimesThe AtlanticNew York magazine, The Washington PostThe New Republic, and many other publications. He was most recently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Brown Boy is his first book.

Books by Omer Aziz

Brown Boy

A Memoir


Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s incisive and luminous prose.

In the early 2000s, Toronto, Omer Aziz’s working-class neighbourhood is miles away from the wealthy white downtown. A first...
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