LUMS YOUNG WRITERS WORKSHOP
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 2024
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. She was shortlisted for the Zeenat Haroon Writing Prize in 2020, and winner of The
Missing Slate’s New Voices Competition in 2017.
Sara’s day job involves editing policy research at an Islamabad-based thinktank, while still trying to
make time for her own writing. Her work focuses on women navigating domesticity and modernity,
and explores themes of intimacy, nostalgia, friendship, and the big questions hidden away in
everyday things.
Noor
Rehman
Noor Rehman is a writer from South Waziristan, Wana. Noor received his bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Government College University, Lahore (GCUL) and completed his MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from University of Central Florida, Orlando (UCF) as a Fulbright Scholar. Currently, he teaches at the University of Central Punjab (UCP) as part of the Faculty of Languages and Literature. Noor is also working on his debut novel, Clay Bodies, which tells the story of a fictional character Armaan Khan in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s. He participated in the LUMS Young Writers Workshop in 2018.
Aneeqa Wattoo
Aneeqa Wattoo is a writer, a translator and a mother based in Lahore, Pakistan. In 2015, she was awarded the Sir Anwar Pervez-Oxford Graduate Scholarship to pursue an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. She currently teaches Academic Writing to undergraduate students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Her creative work explores the intersections between gender and the politics of gendered spaces in Pakistan.Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Meridian, McNeese Review, New Ohio Review, Southern Humanities Review, New Plains Review, Lakeer Magazine and others. Her poetry and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
She is the Founder of The Creative Room—an online interdisciplinary humanities focussed on South Asia, the first of its kind in Pakistan. She teaches various classes about literature, creative writing and history through The Creative Room.
Amna
Chaudry
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.
Usama
Lali
Usama Lali is a writer and teacher based in Lahore. He did his MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Washington, Seattle, where he also taught undergraduate creative writing courses for two years. He currently teaches life writing, multilingualism and screenwriting at LUMS, Lahore. He is a recipient of the David Guterson Award ‘23 and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize ‘23 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.
Zuha
Siddiqui
Zuha Siddiqui is an award-winning journalist based in Pakistan, covering climate, technology and human rights. Her reporting has appeared in Foreign Policy, VICE, Slate, NPR, and other publications. Most recently, she was a Labor and Tech fellow at Rest of World, covering how technology impacts work and workers in South Asia.
Zuha's work has been supported by fellowships from the South Asian Journalism Association, One World Media and the EU Journalism Fund. Her reporting on Karachi The Sinking Cities Project won The European Journalism Centre’s 2023 Climate Journalism Award. That same year, she was a finalist for the Thomson Foundation’s Young Journalist Award.
Zuha holds a Masters in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies from NYU, where she was a Falak Sufi scholar. She has also received training from the International Center for Journalists, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and the Center for Excellence in Journalism and the Oxford Climate Journalism Network.
Mahrukh
Aamir
Mahrukh Aamir is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. She has an MFA in fiction from Boise State University. She has also taught undergraduate courses in creative writing, most recently a course on autofiction at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Mahrukh is at work on a novel.
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Younis B. Azeem
Younis B. Azeem is a Fulbright Scholar who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. He is also a WriteOn NYC Fellow, and former host of the reading series, TNS After Hours, in Manhattan's East Village. His writing appears in JAKE, Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. Younis is also a stand-up comedian and in 2018 created and hosted the series Stand Up LUMS, and has performed at venues all over Islamabad, Lahore and New York City. He is currently Faculty in the English Department at LUMS where he teaches courses on creative writing.
Ali
Junejo
Ali Junejo is a writer, actor and director from Karachi. He has been working in Theater for nearly two decades. As an actor he has performed several characters written by a number of known writers; from Beckett ('Waiting for Godot' directed by Zia Mohyeddin) to Mamet (the Urdu adaptation of 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' called 'Dead End,' directed by Sunil Shanker) to Shaffer (an Urdu translation of 'Equus,' directed by Sunil Shanker) and Reginald Rose (an Urdu adaptation of '12 angry men,' called 'Qusoorwaar' directed by Sunil Shanker), Edward Albee ('The Goat or Who is Sylvia' directed by Sunil Shanker), Nick Payne ('Constellations' directed by Gregory Thompson), Bee Gul ('Bedroom Conversations,' directed by Khalid Ahmad). In film, Ali acted in 'Next Scene' (short film), directed by Sunil Shanker as well as Saim Sadiqs Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury prize winning 'Joyland,' for which Ali won the award for Best Actor in an international film at Sao Paulo International Film Festival (2022) and Palm Springs International Film Festival (2023) and Kanwal Khoosats 'Maya' (Currently in post production).
As a director he has worked on Eugene Ionesco's 'The Bald Soprano' which he also acted in. Aside from those, he has co-written and co-directed a handful of original plays, such as 'The Man on a Black Horse,' (2012-2013) and 'The Portrait Of Rumi' (2012), which he also acted in.
Most recently he wrote, directed and performed 'Both Sit In Silence For A While' (A dark comedy) which toured Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad and was also translated into Dutch and performed in Holland by Studio Antigone. He has also written its sequel 'Both Storm Into The Room Breathless, Enraged and Unforgiving Yet Seemingly Unaware Of Who Is Chasing Whom' - another dark comedy due to be performed in Lahore. Currently Ali is pre-producing his feature film directorial debut 'Would I Lie To You,' for which he wrote the screenplay based on a story written by Joshinder Chaggar and Sunil Shanker.
Past Guest Spekaers
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR, AND STORYTELLER
Author of The Merman and the Book of Power
Bilal
Minto
AUTHOR
Author of Model Town
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).
Haneya Zuberi
Haniya's journalistic work has appeared in numerous publications at home and abroad. Her first short story was published in The Aleph Review.
Rabia Saeed
Rabia Saeed was a finalist for the Editor's Prize in Prose for Meridian, and received the 2020 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, and the 2021 James W. Foley Award. She teaches Creative Writing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Most recently her short story “Cadet College, Kohat” was published in The Seventh Wave. She was awarded the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University in 2022.
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.
Amna Chaudhry
Amna Chaudhry is a writer and activist. She has an MA in South Asia Studies from SOAS. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Caravan India and Himal Southasian. She was also a fellow in South Asia Speaks 2021.
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.
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.
Support LUMS Young Writers Workshop
LUMS Young Writers Workshop has been supporting and inspiring writers in their journeys since 2012. It is the only institution in Pakistan of its kind that offers an all-expenses paid residential experience to all its participants. It provides a crucial space for reflection, creativity, and community in a country where creative work and support for young writers is severely lacking.
In the ten years of the workshop, the LUMS Young Writers Workshop has success stories to share. Rabia Saeed (LYWW 2018) was selected the Stegner Fellow for 2022-2024. Hurmat Kazmi, a participant from Karachi (LYWW 2017) was admitted to Iowa Writers Workshop and published in the New Yorker.
Anum Asi, a participant in 2015, MFA Cornell University, said, "I've found the LUMS Young Writers Workshop to be a unique experience in Pakistan both for its focus on craft as well as its residential format. I gained ideas and principles for my stories, for finding my own voice. It helped direct my writing in really productive and inspiring ways. And though one might think a week is not very long I formed lasting relationships with the other young writers I met there, and gained a creative community that I didn’t really have access to before."
The LUMS Young Writers Workshop is supported by annual grants as well as through the LUMS Young Writers Workshop Endowment Fund. Your support will allow us to expand the workshop to other genres including poetry and Urdu writing. If you would like to support the workshop, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Bilal Tanweer (bilal.tanweer@lums.edu.pk) or Ahmad Saad Qureshi at Office of Advancement (ahmad.qureshi@lums.edu.pk). Your donation is eligible for tax benefits in Pakistan and the USA.
We value every contribution, no matter the amount.
OUR SUPPORTERS
1. Osman Khalid Waheed
2. Shah Salim and Shehzad Shah
3. Mohsin Hamid
4. Danish Iqbal
5. Bilal Hasan Minto
6. Kamila Shamsie