Shahnaz Bashir


Shahnaz Bashir is a Kashmiri novelist and academic based in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Education and work

Shahnaz is a university gold medalist in media studies and teaches narrative journalism and conflict reportage at the Central University of Kashmir.
Kashmir Life, in its Jan 2016 year-ender special issue, declared Shahnaz as "one of the eleven impact-makers from the entire population of Jammu & Kashmir".
He is the South Asia juror for the first global journalism prize True Story Award instituted in Bern, Switzerland. The Award is a high-profile journalism prize carrying 177,000 Swiss Francs and is to be given each year to best longform reportage published from all over the world.

Critical acclaim

His debut novel The Half Mother won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. A Marathi translation of The Half Mother was published in 2017 and the French version of the novel was published by Editions du Rocher in Paris on 4 March 2020. The Half Mother is the first novel from Kashmir to be translated into a foreign language.
Shahnaz Bashir's second book Scattered Souls was longlisted for "Tata Lit Live Award 2017" for Best Book - Fiction. It won The Citizen's "Talent of the Year Award 2017". In April 2018, Kashmir Observer reported "Scattered Souls is the best-selling fiction book in Kashmir till date… Its sales have surpassed the other fiction titles by Kashmiri writers writing in English". His works of fiction have been compared with Saadat Hasan Manto and Anton Chekov. The Asian Age observed: "There are easy comparisons with Manto in the often-shocking glibness with which Bashir lays bare a character’s innermost feelings, or with Chekov in the rootedness of the characters to their circumstances."
In 2017, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council awarded him a writer's residency at Winterthur, Switzerland.

Books