Shubnum Khan - A Search for Belonging

Shubnum Khan is a South African author and artist. When not travelling, Shubnum lives in Durban writing and drawing for a living.

She holds a Master’s degree in English and has been selected for a number of literary fellowships, including the Octavia Butler Fellow at Jack Jones Literary Arts and as a Mellon Fellow at Stellenbosch University.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times; McSweeney’s Quarterly; HuffPost; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Sunday Times (London); Marie Claire; and others.

Khan’s first novel, Onion Tears, was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Writing in English.

Her essay collection, How I Accidentally Became a Stock Photo was published in South Africa and India with Pan Macmillan in 2021.

Her latest book The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil is a haunting, a love story and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.

Akbar Manzil was the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast near Durban. Eight decades later when Sana and her father move to the house, the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, it is in near-ruins, crumbling, shabby and dark.

Full of questions about her new home, Sana is drawn to the deserted east wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects – and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades. Soon, Sana begins to discover the tangled, troubling history of the house, awakening the memories of the house itself and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone – living and dead – at Akbar Manzil. In the US and the UK the book’s title is The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years.

 Source www.panmacmillan.co.za.