Shahnaz Habib

Shahnaz Habib is the author of Airplane Mode, a personal and cultural history of travel from a postcolonial perspective (forthcoming from Catapult in 2023). She was the winner of the JCB Prize, India’s most valuable prize for literature, as the translator of the novel Jasmine Days. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the New Yorker online, Creative Nonfiction, Agni, Brevity, The Guardian, Afar, and Multiplicity, and her work has been cited in the Best American Essays series.

Shahnaz has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature and Writer-in-Residence at La Muse in southern France. Born and raised in Kerala, India, she earned her M.A. in English from the University of Delhi. She has also worked as an Associate Press Officer for the United Nations and as a translator for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Shahnaz lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Please visit the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing program page to learn about the curriculum, faculty, program options, and more.