Shandana minhas biography samples
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I’m interested in breaking stereotypes: Sabyn Javeri
Sabyn Javeri in New Delhi recently. Photo: Shireen Quadri
THE PUNCH: How about fiction writers themselves? Aren’t they more open to it?
SABYN JAVERI: Well, writers like Omar Shahid and Shandana Minhas have been very supportive. In Pakistan, there are now two kinds of waves — of Pakistani authors who actually live in Pakistan and the international authors who write about Pakistan. So, I think there is a bit of a division there. It’ll be interesting to see how that gap has bridged. I have got a lot of support from Pakistani writers who actually live in Pakistan. I haven’t heard much from any of the international writers. In fact, I didn’t even get a blurb from any Pakistani writer. Eventually, Indian and American and British writers gave me a blurb. So, I don’t know what that says. This divide also crops up from the themes that writers choose to write about. Authors in Pakistan write about the Pakistan that they observe while authors who live abroad write on themes that matters to the international audience.
THE PUNCH: You have been writing short stories. A novel needs a different kind of rigour. How did you prepare yourself for this?
SABYN JAVERI: It was quite daunting. I tricked myself into do
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The Politics of Place: A Conversation Between Shze-Hui Tjoa and Farah Ali
What roles do place and memory play in the construction of a narrative? In this conversation, memoirist Shze-Hui Tjoa and novelist Farah Ali talk about how these forces affect the storytelling in their respective books: The Story Game (Tin House, 2024), an interrogation of memory, childhood, and c-PTSD that is part travel memoir while being rooted in Singapore; and The River, The Town(Dzanc, 2023, paperback 2025), a narrative about a family that tries to build a life in different places in Pakistan-a village, a town, a city, a room, an apartment. Together, they speak about how their characters experience the effects of place on their psychology, and the complex ethics of re-imagining those places as diasporic writers so as to capture them on the page.
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Farah Ali: I want to start by talking about fiction and nonfiction. When I was listening to your podcast with David Naimon on Between the Covers, the question of what aspects of your book were one or the other came up. Naimon said, “If someone were to call it a fiction or even fantasy, they would also be partially correct.” And further in the discussion you said, “If I were to try and tell someb