Shahnaz Bashir is a Kashmiri novelist and academic from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. [1]
Shahnaz Bashir is a Kashmiri novelist and academic from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. [1]
Shahnaz Bashir is a doctoral fellow and teaching associate in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). [2] He teaches "Writing As Communication" and "Public Speaking", and has been awarded a commendation for "excellent pedagogy" by the Directorate of Graduate Programs at the Department of Communication at UMass. Earlier in 2021 and 2022, he was consecutively twice a finalist for Distinguished Teaching Award in the Grad Teaching Associate category at the university. He was also awarded the Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship by UMass. [3]
Before coming to UMass, he taught narrative journalism and conflict reportage at the Central University of Kashmir. [4]
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". [5]
He is the South Asia juror for the True Story Award, the first-ever global journalism prize instituted in Bern Switzerland. [6]
His debut novel The Half Mother (Hachette, 2014) won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. [7] The Marathi translation of The Half Mother was published in 2017, [8] the Telugu version came out in December 2022. [9] The French version of the novel (La Mère Orpheline) was published by Editions du Rocher in Paris. [10] The Half Mother is the first-ever novel from Kashmir to be translated into a foreign (European) language.
Shahnaz Bashir's second book Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016) was longlisted for "Tata Lit Live Award 2017" for Best Book - Fiction. It was conferred with The Citizen's "Talent of the Year Award 2017". [11] In April 2018, Kashmir Observer reported "Scattered Souls is the best-selling fiction book in Kashmir till date... Its sales [in the bookstores of Srinagar] have surpassed the other fiction titles by Kashmiri writers writing in English". [12] His works of fiction have been compared with Saadat Hasan Manto and Anton Chekov. [13] 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." [13]
In 2017, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council awarded him a writer's research residency at Winterthur, Switzerland. [14]