The Nonfiction Workshop
Instructors: Zuha Siddiqui & Sara Khan
This workshop celebrates the work and memory of the writer Annie Ali Khan. This year, the non-fiction track of the LUMS Young Writers Workshop will be moderated and mentored by writers Sara Khan and Zuha Siddiqui. The five-day workshop will help participants understand the process of writing a non-fiction piece: beginning with choosing a subject, initial research (and pre-reporting), developing and writing the piece, and concluding with pitching and publishing. It will also provide participants with a clearer look at the mechanics of non-fiction writing — such as beginnings and endings, writing place and people, and the multiplicity of formats existing within the genre (from personal essay and memoir to cultural criticism and oral history, as well as features and traditional reportage). This workshop operates on the belief that we can improve as writers not just by writing regularly, but also by becoming thoughtful readers and critics. This year, we hope to have a maximum of 8 participants.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Participants of this workshop will work their way through the process of non-fiction writing, beginning with the idea stage (asking themselves two fundamental questions: What makes a good story? What makes a story worth pursuing?), and moving on to initial research, pitching, and eventually publishing. There will also be a reading list comprising books and non-fiction materials written by some of the best practitioners of the genre – including Annie Ali Khan, in whose memory this workshop has been created. There will be 5-7 mandatory readings (longform essays, reportage and craft texts) which will be sent to participants in advance, and we will spend a portion of each of our five sessions discussing and dissecting these readings in detail.
About Zuha
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.
About Sara
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 developing policy research and advisory at an Islamabad-based
consultancy. 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.