Books by Safinah Danish Elahi
Safinah Danish Elahi is a lawyer, poet and novelist from Pakistan. She has earned her MFA in Publishing and Contemporary Fiction summa cum laude from Emerson College, Boston. Her poetry collection The Unbridled Romance of Romance of Love and Pain was labeled epiphanic by the nation’s leading newspaper, Dawn. Her debut novel, Eye on the Prize, published in 2020 and translated into Urdu, has been converted into a TV series. She is also the founder of an award-winning publishing house, Reverie Publishers. She is a fellow at the International Writer’s Program and participated at the University of Iowa Fall Residency 2022. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, her second novel, has been longlisted for the Asian Fiction Prize 2023.
“It was a story that had been sitting with me for a very long time, and I just wasn’t able to put it down. The home that the main characters, Misha and Zohaib, live in, is my childhood home. The mulberry tree, the big garden, and the staircase—all of that is based on my childhood home, but the characters are fictional. The story is about a pair of siblings and their househelp’s daughter. I wanted to talk about class structures in Pakistan. Because my first novel dealt with the elite class, I wanted this to be a commentary between the middle, the lower, and the upper class. I draw that comparison by the househelp’s daughter being best friends with the two children in the house. I tried to show how the children are able to form a deep friendship with Nadia, who’s the househelp’s daughter, but there is this resentment and tension in the air when the adults are involved. It deals with harassment, at different levels, in Nadia’s life, and it deals with mental health. I tried to touch upon quite a few things without actually saying too much, but my main focus was on what a woman’s life looks like when she is plucked from a very low class and dropped into the upper class and then the middle class. It’s a commentary on what happens when a girl receives an education she didn’t really ask for. Because here, when you educate someone, you are doing them a favor. You’re trying to make a better life for them, but, at the same time, does the social structure support this escalation in class? Is the girl then able to take agency in her life or is she somehow confused between the two classes? There are a lot of questions that come up within the story.” Read more...
Safinah Danish Elahi, Novelist
Interviews with Safinah Danish Elahi
The Best Novels from Pakistan, recommended by Safinah Danish Elahi
Over the past five years, Pakistani novels have become much more focused on people’s lived experience in Pakistan—rather than just catering to the expectations of an international audience, argues novelist, lawyer and publisher Safinah Danish Elahi. She picks five of her favorite novels from Pakistan, four of them published very recently.
Interviews where books by Safinah Danish Elahi were recommended
The Best Novels from Pakistan, recommended by Safinah Danish Elahi
Over the past five years, Pakistani novels have become much more focused on people’s lived experience in Pakistan—rather than just catering to the expectations of an international audience, argues novelist, lawyer and publisher Safinah Danish Elahi. She picks five of her favorite novels from Pakistan, four of them published very recently.
