Rana Saadullah Khan


Rana Saadullah Khan

Rana Saadullah Khan is a writer from Lahore and Islamabad. His work has been published in Lakeer, Jamhoor, The Aleph Review, as well as through UNESCO Pakistan and by the history education platform, Hashiya.

A Raja in Beirut

Rana Saadullah Khan

Nov 26, 2025

Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja The Gullible (and His Mother) recently became the first Arab-American work to receive a National Book Award in Fiction. The decades-spanning novel tells the story of a singular life and its absurdities. Rana Saadullah Khan dives into Alameddine’s tragicomic world.

A Writer and Their World: Zubair Ahmad

Rana Saadullah Khan

Nov 24, 2025

Rana Saadullah Khan sat down with Zubair Ahmad — Punjabi language writer and poet, and two-time Dhahan Prize winner — at Trinjan (a bookstore run by the author to promote the Punjabi language), to talk about his journey as a writer, his interest in the Punjabi language, realism, dreams and more.

Navigating Arundhati Roy’s Retractions

Rana Saadullah Khan

Oct 27, 2025

Arundhati Roy’s latest offering, Mother Mary Comes To Me, is an unflinching look at a difficult childhood and a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and its effects on a life lived in service of truth and justice. But, the author wonders if this memoir is a “safe” version of a trailblazing, resistant life.

That Which Looms in Hiromi Kawakami’s World

Rana Saadullah Khan

Jul 18, 2025

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (translated by Asa Yoneda, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025) captured the public imagination with its post-apocalyptic narrative of a future depicting humanity’s precarious survival. But is this yet another in a long line of hyped spec-fic works translated from the Japanese, or does it offer greater insight into the genre?

The Sins of James

Rana Saadullah Khan

Jun 14, 2025

Satire aims to provoke, but does Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel go far enough?

Banu Mushtaq’s Muslim Women

Rana Saadullah Khan

May 12, 2025

𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘓𝘢𝘮𝘱, the first ever book translated from Kannada shortlisted by the International Booker Prize, is a collection of short stories not bothered with defining and diagnosing the problems of the nation at large, but with the minutiae, with domestic squabbles, with very peculiar anxieties