Bilal Tanweer

Born 1983 in Karachi/Pakistan.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator whose writing has appeared in various newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Dawn, Granta, Vallum, Critical Muslim, The Caravan and Words Without Borders. He holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University, New York, NY/USA for which he received a Fulbright Scholarship. He currently lives in Lahore/Pakistan and teaches in the English Program at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His recent course offerings include The Urban Experience, Major Voices in Contemporary American Fiction, Mechanics of Fiction: A Reading Course of Writers, and Fiction Writing Workshop.

His first novel, The Scatter Here is Too Great, was published in the Indian Subcontinent by Random House in 2013. In 2014 it was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, in the USA by Harper Collins and in France by Editions Stock. It won the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 and The Chautauqua Prize 2015. It was published in Germany by Hanser Verlag in 2016.

He was selected as one of Granta’s New Voices and is one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar’s Chakiwara Mein Visaal. Earlier, he translated two novels by Ibn-e Safi, The House Fear (Random House India, 2010).