An article about the Salam Award Workshop that Liz Hand and I taught at. I was so behind, I didn’t get a chance to respond to the journalist with more specifics, but luckily, Liz did. 
“To be a new writer in Pakistan today can be as thrilling as it is disheartening. Positioned as we are on the fringes of a global literary culture, where the selective, nominal role of representation is favoured over the myriad stories that are lived and told. Enriched by a vast tradition of fusion and transition, we keep witnessing a new indigenous literature emerging in newer, more powerful, more confident ways – yet the majority of local talent remains lost to the world.
In the midst of such gaps and dissonance, writers often take it upon themselves to find ways of creating new platforms to promote writing and publishing opportunities in Pakistan through committed and impassioned endeavours to counter the absence of structural reach and support in existing cultural-literary spaces. The Salam Award Writers Workshop has been one such endeavour – a writing residency for science fiction, fantasy, and speculative writing that took place in Lahore earlier this month. It was hosted by the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). The writing workshop was organised and fuelled by the passion and dedication of Tehseen Baweja, Usman T Malik, and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, furthering the vision of the Salam Award that Tehseen and Usman co-founded in 2017 to promote imaginative fiction in Pakistan…”
Read more here: