Founder and Organiser LYWW
Bilal Tanweer
Bilal Tanweer is a writer, translator, and the founder of the LUMS Young Writers Workshop. He initiated the workshop to provide mentorship, learning opportunities, and community support for emergent writers. The alumni of the workshop have won international acclaim, with achievements including the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, admissions to competitive, fully-funded MFA programs, and contributions to prominent publications such as The New Yorker.
Tanweer's debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, was published in five territories and has been translated into French and German. The work was honored with the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and named a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature as well as the Chautauqua Prize. His fellowships include the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. In 2023, he served as the Chair of the Jury for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Mentors 2026
Mahrukh Aamir
Mahrukh Aamir, a writer from Lahore, has an MFA in Fiction Writing from Boise State University. She has also taught creative writing courses at the university level, including a course taught at LUMS titled Inventing the Self: Introduction to Autofiction. Her most recent publication titled It is the Despair of One’s Life, Being One’s Character, was published in Atmospheric Quarterly. Mahrukh is at work on a novel.
Younis B. Azeem
Younis B. Azeem, a Fulbright Scholar, earned his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. A WriteOn NYC Fellow, he also hosted the reading series TNS After Hours in Manhattan's East Village. Azeem is a 2025 Best of the Net nominated writer whose work appears in JAKE, Evergreen Review and elsewhere. Additionally, he is a stand-up comedian who created and hosted Stand Up LUMS, and has performed in various venues across Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, and New York City. He currently teaches various courses on Creative Writing in the English Department at LUMS, including An Introduction to Humour Writing.
Usama Lali
Usama Lali is a Lahore based writer and filmmaker with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has taught life writing and screenwriting courses at the University of Washington and LUMS in the past. His short film (Permanent Guest) that he co-wrote screened at TIFF ‘25 and Sarmad Khoosat’s upcoming feature film that he assistant directed premiered at Berlinale ‘26. He is a recipient of the David Guterson Award ‘23 and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlistee whose English, Urdu and Punjabi fiction, essays, poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Adda Stories, Aleph Review, Pancham and others.
Mahnoor Azeem
Mahnoor Azeem is an illustrator and writer based in Lahore. She holds an MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar. She teaches illustration and design at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is the lead illustrator for South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG), and illustrates children’s books. Her creative practice explores themes of memory, identity, and place, working primarily digitally while also experimenting with ceramics, printmaking, and fabric-based projects.
Sara Khan
Sara Khan is a writer and editor from Peshawar. She has an MA in Cultural Criticism from NYU, where she was an American Association of University Women International Fellow and a Stenbeck Scholar.
Sara’s day job involves editing policy research at an Islamabad-based think tank. To offset this, she edits and teaches, preferring to help others tell their stories while she tries to make time for her own writing. Her work is most concerned with women navigating domesticity and modernity, and explores themes of intimacy, nostalgia, friendship, and the big questions hidden away in everyday things.
She was shortlisted for the Zeenat Haroon Writing Prize in 2020, and winner of The Missing Slate’s New Voices Competition in 2017. Her work has appeared in two Pakistani anthologies: Narrating Pakistan and Mightier.
Noor Rehman
Hailing from South Waziristan, Wana, Noor Rehman completed his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Government College University, Lahore. He later pursued an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is currently part of the Faculty of English at Forman Christian College University (FCCU) and is querying literary agents for his debut novel, Love and Other Sorrows, set in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s.
Aneeqa Wattoo
Aneeqa Wattoo is a writer and translator based in Lahore, Pakistan. She was awarded the Sir Anwar Pervez-University of Oxford Graduate Scholarship to pursue an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research and writing explore themes of motherhood, personal freedom and the politics of space in Pakistan. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various local and international literary journals including Meridian, McNeese Review, New Ohio Review, New Plains Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dawn and Lakeer Magazine among others. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she is the Founder of The Creative Room, an interdisciplinary humanities platform for online learning focused on South Asia. She is the host of a podcast, Unpacking Pakistan- Discourses about the Culture, Politics and Economy of Pakistan at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Aiman Tahir Khan
Aiman Tahir Khan is a poet and translator from Lahore, Pakistan. She was selected as the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate of Pakistan in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Rumpus, and Shō Poetry Journal, among others, and were finalists for the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Contest (2025). She currently serves as Associate Editor at Sontag Mag and was most recently a Brooklyn Poets Fellow.
Zuha Siddiqui
Zuha Siddiqui is an award winning journalist covering climate, technology and human rights.
She has reported on the use of military surveillance technology in the pandemic, Pakistani women turning to the internet for sex-ed, aspiring Pakistani Amazon sellers using roundabout ways to get themselves onto the platform, and how the platform economy sets up women to fail. Her work has been published in National Public Radio, Slate, BuzzFeed News, The New Humanitarian, VICE, Rest of World, and other publications.
She is a 2025 South Asian Journalists Association Outstanding International Reporting Award
recipient, a 2025 Society of Publishers in Asia Editorial Excellence Award recipient, a 2025
South Asia Speaks Nonfiction Fellow, and a 2023 Thomson Foundation Young Journalist Award
finalist. Her work has been supported by grants from One World Media, the International Center
for Journalists and the South Asian Journalists Association.
Zuha is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Habib University, where she teaches journalism,
creative nonfiction and storytelling. She holds a Master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies &
Journalism from NYU, where she was a Falak Sufi Scholar. She is currently working on her first
book.
Past Speakers
Saba
Imtiaz
JOURNALIST, RESEARCHER, AND AUTHOR
Author of Karachi, You're Killing Me! and Society Girl
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR, AND STORYTELLER
Author of The Merman and the Book of Power
Our Alumni
Aisha Hamid
Aisha Hamid was shortlisted by the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, 2019, and received an honorable mention by The Berlin Writing Prize 2019. She is a Qalambaaz '23 fellow and an alum of the Write Beyond Borders mentorship program, 2021. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vallum Magazine, The Aleph Review, Yoda Press, and elsewhere. She is currently a Poetry Reader at The Adroit Journal and an MFA student at Northwestern University.
Asad Alvi
Asad taught previously within the liberal arts program at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Their writing has appeared in Words Without Borders, Columbia: A Journal of Literature, The Hindu, and Kashmir Lit, as well as in poetry books, Uprooted: An Anthology of Gender and Illness (2015), and The World that Belongs to Us (2020).
Haniya Zuberi
Haniya's journalistic work has appeared in numerous publications at home and abroad. Her first short story was published in The Aleph Review.
Rasti Farooq
Rasti currently works at Puffball Studios, where she co-wrote, produced, and acted in animated films, Shehr e Tabassum and Swipe. In 2021, Swipe made official selections at 3 BAFTA qualifying festivals, Annecy, Animafest and LA Shorts. Rasti is also a theater and film actor. Her latest short film, May I Have This Seat, won Best International Short at Dubai Indie Film Festival.
Hurmat Kazmi
Hurmat's work has been published in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s and is forthcoming from Granta and American Short Fiction most recently published their short story titled “Selection Week” in The New Yorker.
Rabia Saeed
Rabia Saeed is from Kohat, Pakistan and a 2022-24 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. She was the winner of the 2020 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, the 2021 James W. Foley Award, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Meridian, Wigleaf, and The Seventh Wave Magazine. Until recently, she taught Creative Writing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Currently, she teaches in the English and Creative Writing departments at Stanford University. She will be joining USC as a PhD candidate in the fall.
Amna Chaudhry
Amna Chaudhry is a writer, feminist activist, and yoga teacher. Her fiction has received support from the LUMS Young Writers Workshop, South Asia Speaks and Asia Women Writers. In 2023 her short story Khazina was shortlisted for the ZHR prize. Her reportage and essays on Pakistan's feminist and environmental movements have appeared in Guernica, Caravan and Himal Southasian, amongst others. She also writes Modsquad, a newsletter that charts the relationship between culture and patriarchy in South Asia and engages with various ideas of feminist world making.
Ayesha Raees
Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Raees's first book of poetry, Coining A Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and judged by Kaveh Akbar and will be forthcoming in March 2022.
Komal Waqar Ali
Komal Waqar Ali is a teacher and writer based in Karachi. Her essay was longlisted for the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize in 2020. She is currently exploring (or thinking about) the idea of liminal spaces within homes.
Rana Saadullah Khan
Saadullah writes fiction and travelogues, and has been published in Jamhoor, The Aleph Review, and has a short story forthcoming in a Vasl publication. In 2021, he was also a fiction fellow at Vasl, working with mentor Nudrat Kamal. He is currently working on a novel with mentor Madhuri Vijay as a South Asia Speaks fellow for the year 2022.
Javeria Hasnain
Javeria Hasnain is a poet, translator, and educator from Karachi, and the author of SIN (Chestnut Review, 2024). Her poems and prose have appeared widely, most recently, in Pleiades, Poet Lore, The Brazenhead Review, and Foglifter. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York as a Fulbright scholar, and was selected as a 2023-24 Educational Associate at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She has received fellowships and support for her writing from Sewanee Writers Conference, International Writing Program (IWP), and Tamaas. Hasnain has taught creative writing workshops with Brooklyn Poets, Writing Workshops, Writopia Lab Inc, Kitab Ghar, and Writing Colab, among others. She has previously also worked with Cave Canem Foundation, Alice James Press, and Tupelo Press. She is currently teaching at Habib University and reads for The Rumpus.