Sorayya Khan
Sorayya Khan was born in Vienna, Austria, grew up in Islamabad, Pakistan, and received her BA and MA in the US. She didn’t know she wanted to be a writer until she began writing fiction and couldn’t stop.
Sorayya is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir (2022), which she wrote after her mother’s death, and three novels, Noor (2004), Five Queen’s Road (2009), and City of Spies (2015), which won Best International Fiction Award at the Sharjah Book Fair (2016).
Sorayya’s writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, The Malahat Review, Journal of Narrative Politics, and several other magazines and anthologies. She is the winner of a Malahat Review Novella Prize for "In the Shadows of the Margalla Hills," an early imagining of a central event in City of Spies. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award which took her to Bangladesh and Pakistan in order to research Noor --and changed her understanding of humanity and war. Some years ago, before she realized she would write non-fiction, she received a grant from a local arts foundation that sent her to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where she interviewed tsunami survivors and learned more about love and resilience than she could have imagined. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two children, and is happy to be again at work in a fictional universe.
“He was reminded of what he liked about Irene so much; that she had not written her war away, she claimed it as her own again and again--near the chichra tree in Five Queen's Road and along the cobbled sidewalk opposite a canal in Maastricht and who knows how many more times in the privacy of her own thoughts.”
“Noor was Sajida's secret. She knew the exact moment her child was conceived. Purple passed slowly, the lowest of clouds, over her eyes. Bathed in such magnificent color, Sajida lay perfectly still. Much later, she would try to relive the exact moment, as if she needed to understand how the fact of her child could have entered her body and mind at the same time. But Sajida would not summon the gentle shade ever again.”
“As much as Sajida once loved him, she thought it unjust that her daughter, forsaken by her father, should have any physical likeness to him at all.”
“It wasn't only our country they occupied," Irene explained to Amir Shah. "They occupied our minds.”