The child of Ismaili Muslim parents, Emil Rem was born to a middle-class East Indian family living in Tanzania. At the age of five, amid the political upheavals in Tanzania at the time, he was uprooted and shipped off to England, where he was brought up by a working-class English family. His teenage life was spent commuting between one culture and the other. Eventually, considering himself an alien to both cultures, he emigrated to Canada.
Emil started writing to pass on his heritage to his two teenage boys. The stories compare individuals he met on his travels to those left behind or long dead in Africa and England.
Emil's stories have been published worldwide and are available in full on his website emilrem.ca.