Zeenat Haroon Rashid Prize goes to Rabbits

KARACHI/LAHORE/ISLAMABAD: The Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women for 2023 has gone to writer Sana Mohsin for her short story RABBITS. Sana will receive a cash award.

This year the prize was awarded for fiction and was chosen by a judging panel that included award-winning and award-nominated novelists Mohammed Hanif, Shandana Minhas and Aamina Ahmed, the former literary editor at DAWN Sarwat Yasmeen Azeem, and freelance editor Shan Vahidy.

The judges agreed that RABBITS was a sharp, surrealist story which used a powerful central image to articulate the power dynamics within a household, making the mundane into something much more menacing and unexpected.

The winning author Sana Mohsin is a writer and researcher based in Lahore. Having recently completed studies in English Literature at universities in Canada, her writing has appeared in various Canadian literary publications and her debut poetry collection, Grief Grows Elsewhere, was published in 2022.

In a very competitive year, the judges also highly commended five other shortlisted stories for their literary merit: A Pot Of Daal (an evocative account of mother-daughter relationships told through a recipe for daal), Khazina (a husband’s second marriage creates heartbreak but also new opportunities for an abandoned wife ) by Amna Chaudhry, malik and khadija wait (a poignant yet quietly humorous story about grief and loss and getting on with the everyday business of survival ) by Saher Hasnain, Mother In The Jamun Tree (seeking escape from the existential miseries of life, one woman finds a novel solution) by Samia Altaf, The Long Way Round (an original piece using magical realism and humour to examine an unexpected manifestation of “fiends of the mind”) by Ayesha Malik.

The winning submission will be published in a national newspaper, both online and in print in November, and shortly thereafter, all shortlisted submissions will be published on the official prize website www.zhrwritingprize.com