Rana Saadullah Khan

Jan 13, 2026

𝘒𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘶 by Fauzia Rafique, translated from the Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz (2025), follows Muhammad Hussain Khan ‘𝘒𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘶’ who has escaped Pakistan and lives in Vancouver, running a small business. For Rana Saadullah Khan the novel’s utopic imagination (depictions of the Punjab, of discrimination, of diasporic yearnings or lack thereof) draws such a neat dividing line between the lands in which horrors can occur and where dreams come to fruition that it makes one hesitant to celebrate 𝘒𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘶 and its acts of hope.

Rana Saadullah Khan

Dec 18, 2025

Zeenat Hisam’s Tamannaon Ke Deyaar Se is an anthology of translated poems from North American women poets. Rana Saadullah Khan wonders why the translations have not found a wider audience and muses on Perveen Shakir’s enduring influence on Urdu literary creatives.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Rana Saadullah Khan

Jun 14, 2025

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

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