Shubnum Khan is a South African writer and artist. Her first novel Onion Tears was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Fiction Prize.
Her collection of misadventures How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo and Other Strange and Wonderful Stories was published in 2021 in South Africa and India.
Her US and UK debut The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years was published by Penguin in 2024 and has been translated into Italian and Ukraine. It was selected as an Indie Pick, a Library Reads Pick and a New York Times Editors Choice. She has been published in the New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Huffington Post, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Sunday Times and Saraba magazine.
She has been shortlisted for the Miles Moreland Writing Fellowship for African Writers, selected as the Octavia Butler Fellow at Jack Jones Literary Arts and she has been selected as a Mellon Fellow at Stellenbosch University.
She has writing fellowships at Omi Writers in New York and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. She currently writes and draws in Durban, South Africa