Nasim Marie Jafry was born in the west of Scotland to a Scottish mother and Pakistani father. She has an MA and MSc from Glasgow University but her studies were severely disrupted when she became ill with ME in the 1980s. She remains ill today - the illness has had a devastating impact on her life. Her autobiographical novel 'The State of Me' was published by The Friday Project, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2008. She has had occasional short stories in Scottish literary magazines, and has been shortlisted for the Asham Award (2001), the RLS Award (2005), the Bridport Short Story Prize (2011) and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize (2012). She appeared in a BBC Alba documentary in 2012 in which she discussed her novel and her illness, and in 2013 she read at ‘Dissecting Edinburgh’, a Medicine and Literature event at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. In 2014, she had a short story in The Scotsman, and flash fiction in The Istanbul Review. She was longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2016 and her piece appeared in the 2017 anthology To Carry Her Home. She contributed to artist and writer Nancy Campbell’s Polar Tombola: A Book of Banished Words (Bird Editions, 2017).