Shahnaz Bashir

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

Education and work

Shahnaz Bashir is a doctoral individual and showing partner in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). He was likewise granted the Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship by the UMass. Prior, he showed story news-casting and struggle reportage at the Central University of Kashmir.

Kashmir Life, in its Jan long term ender exceptional issue, proclaimed Shahnaz as “one of the eleven effect producers from the whole populace of Jammu and Kashmir”. He is the South Asia member of the jury for the True Story Award, the very first worldwide news-casting prize organized in Bern, Switzerland. The Award is a high-profile news coverage prize conveying 177,000 Swiss Francs and is to be given every year to best longform reportage distributed from everywhere the world.

Critical acclaim

His introduction novel The Half Mother (Hachette, 2014) won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. The Marathi interpretation of The Half Mother was distributed in 2017 and the French variant of the novel (La Mère Orpheline) was distributed by Editions du Rocher in Paris on 4 March 2020. The Half Mother is the very first novel from Kashmir to be converted into an unfamiliar (European) language.

Shahnaz Bashir’s subsequent book Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016) was longlisted for “Goodbye Lit Live Award 2017” for Best Book – Fiction. It won The Citizen’s “Ability of the Year Award 2017”. In April 2018, Kashmir Observer revealed “Dispersed Souls is the smash hit fiction book in Kashmir till date… Its deals [in the book shops of Srinagar] have outperformed the other fiction titles by Kashmiri journalists writing in English”. His works of fiction have been contrasted and Saadat Hasan Manto and Anton Chekov. The Asian Ageobserved: “There are simple correlations with Manto in the frequently stunning loquaciousness with which Bashir reveals a person’s deepest sentiments, or with Chekov in the rootedness of the characters to their conditions.” In 2017, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council granted him an essayist’s examination residency at Winterthur, Switzerland.

Books

The Half Mother(Hatchette, 2014)

Scattered Souls(HarperCollins, 2016)

The Disease (Speaking Tiger Books, 2020), forthcoming…

Book chapters

• Cinema Palladium, Nachbilder: Eine Foto Text Anthologie (Spector Books via Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and Fotomuseum Winterthur 2021)
• A Childhood to Insurgency, A Desolation Called Peace: Voices From Kashmir (HarperCollins 2019),
• The Gravestone, A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces (Aleph Book Company 2016),
• Crackdown in Natipora, Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings From Kashmir, (Westland 2013)

Awards

• Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship (2020-2023), awarded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Pro-Helvetia Swiss Arts Council Writer’s Residency Award 2018
• The Citizen’s Talent of the Year Award 2016-17
• Scattered Souls Longlisted for Tata Lit Live Award Best Book Fiction 2017
• Winner of Muse India Young Writer Award 2015 for The Half Mother
• Shamim Ahmad Shamim Memorial-Kashmir Times Award 2007
• University Gold Medal and Award of Merit for post-graduate degree in media studies, class of 2004-2006

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