From Draft to Bookshelf

Four published and award-winning SAS Fellows on how to get published.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our first-ever subscriber-exclusive read from South Asia Speaks! By subscribing to our Substack, you’re supporting the future of South Asian literature and helping keep SAS free for outstanding emerging writers. We are deeply grateful.

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a writer is the community of generous peers who demystify the writing life, candidly sharing their failures and triumphs. In this edition of the SAS Substack, four brilliant SAS alumni—Zeyad Masroor Khan, Shah Tazrian Ashrafi, Atharva Pandit, and Nusrat Jafri—answer pivotal questions about writing and publishing. They are well equipped to do so, having published critically acclaimed books: Khan’s City on Fire won the Crossword Book Award for Nonfiction (2024), Pandit’s Hurda won the Godrej Literature Live Live! Fiction Best First Book (2024), and both Jafri’s This Land We Call Home and Ashrafi’s The Hippo Girl and Other Stories have been praised by reviewers and continue to attract a wide readership.

In this conversation, they share insights on staying motivated during edits, preparing for reviews, and—yes—which publishers to avoid!

Let’s get started.