'Instead of playing Scrabble, I thought I'd try writing' Success has been a long time coming. Mr Ahmad joined Pakistan's civil service in 1954 and spent decades living and working in remote outposts along the borders with Iran and Afghanistan - as well as a stint as a diplomat in Kabul from 1979 to 1980 just as the Soviet tanks rolled in. He was inspired to start writing in 1971 after a chance encounter with an American poet travelling through the Swat Valley, where Mr Ahmad was commissioner. "I had some free time on my hands," he said. So instead of playing Scrabble or chess in the evenings, I thought I'd try my hand at writing. I'd done a bit of poetry. I'd been experimenting with Haikus and my wife said it was rubbish. "Why don't you write about something you know," she said." The resulting novel - a collection of gently overlapping short stories linked by a single character - chronicles a disappearing way of life in Pakistan's tribal areas. He describes the harsh beauty of the region's mountains and a strict code of honour where disputes are thrashed out at tribal gatherings. The tough mountain people are made human by their idiosyncratic ways, almost all based on true stories. They were collected during Mr Ahmad's travels through the region, as he sipped cups of sweet tea with tribal elders or pored over official records left behind by the British at independence in 1947. One apparently far-fetched yarn tells how a British officer rode off into the mountains on a mule with saddlebags stuffed with 50,000 gold sovereigns to bribe a tribe which was threatening to ally with the Germans in World War Two. Yet the story is based on a real event, laid down in careful script in a long-gone political officer's diary. The diary lay forgotten in a safe inside a government building in the south-western city of Quetta when Mr Ahmad arrived there in 1959. A locksmith had to be called to bust open its heavy door which had not been unlocked in more than a decade. "It actually happened," said Mr Ahmad, chuckling and shaking his head at the notion of a British officer riding around with bags of coins in an area where few Westerners dare venture today. The manuscript was completed in 1973. There was a brief flurry of interest from publishers in London but Mr Ahmad refused to bow to their demands that the dialogue be modernised from the stilted, formal language used by the tribal elders. Instead he was happy to leave the book as a keepsake from his youthful adventures; something to show his grandchildren from time to time. That all changed two years ago, when Mr Ahmad's younger brother heard about a short story competition in Karachi. Faiza Khan, founder of the Life's Too Short Short Story Prize, said she did not expect much when told about the book. I wasn't particularly keen. I've read retired civil servants in the Pakistani newspapers and they don't tend to make the most thrilling of writers," she said. Still, I started reading it, and before the first chapter was through, I knew I had in my possession a manuscript that really meant something. She passed it on to an editor at Penguin and The Wandering Falcon was published last year. Reviews were immediately enthusiastic, hailing not just the powerful prose but also its clarity in explaining the folly of stamping out tribal identity in a troubled part of the world. It makes Mr Ahmad the latest in a string of Pakistani authors achieving global success, such as Mohammed Hanif, who wrote A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and Mohsin Hamid, best known for The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is due to be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. The full shortlist is as follows: Jamil Ahmad: The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India) Tahmima Anam: The Good Muslim (Canongate) Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke (John Murray) Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Vintage) Uday Prakash: The Walls of Delhi (Translated by Jason Grunebaum; UWA Publishing, W. Australia) Jeet Thayil: Narcopolis (Faber and Faber, London)