Internationally renowned Writer and translator Bilal Tanweer has won the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his novel “The Scatter Here Is Too Great”. This award is named after the late journalist Shakti Bhatt.
The judges for this year’s award were: authors Amit Chaudhuri, AatishTaseer and Mridula Koshy.
Mr Tanweer, who is an alumnus of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is also serving as visiting faculty member at LUMS Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The writer’s fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Critical Muslim, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s “New Voices for 2011” and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant.
He holds an MFA in Writing (fiction) from the Columbia University for which he received a Fulbright Scholarship. He was also named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa.
Mr Tanweer’s debut novel “The Scatter Here is Too Great” was published in the Indian Subcontinent by Random House in December 2013.
The book is about life in the mega city of Karachi