Shahnaz Bashir

Shahnaz Bashir is a doctoral fellow and teaching associate in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). He was awarded the Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship by the UMass.[2]

Earlier he taught narrative journalism and conflict reportage at the Central University of Kashmir.[3]

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".[4]

He is the South Asia juror for the True Story Award, the first-ever global journalism prize[5] 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.[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 and the French version of the novel (La Mère Orpheline) was published by Editions du Rocher in Paris on 4 March 2020. 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 won The Citizen's "Talent of the Year Award 2017".[8] 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".[9] His works of fiction have been compared with Saadat Hasan Manto and Anton Chekov.[10] 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."[11]

In 2017, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council awarded him a writer's research residency at Winterthur, Switzerland.[12]

• The Half Mother (Hatchette, 2014), ISBN 978-9350097885
• Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016), ISBN 978-9352641246
• The Disease (Speaking Tiger Books, 2020), forthcoming...

• A Childhood to Insurgency (Autoethnographic essay), A Desolation Called Peace–Voices from Kashmir (2019), ISBN 978-9353570057
• The Gravestone, A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces (2016), ISBN 978-9382277293
• A Crackdown in Natipora, Of Occupation and Resistance–Writings from Kashmir (2013), ISBN 978-9383260010

• 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