{"id":7904,"date":"2022-03-14T16:56:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T11:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/habib.edu.pk\/HU-news\/?p=7904"},"modified":"2025-07-25T11:29:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:29:50","slug":"habib-university-faculty-wins-award-at-karachi-literature-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/habib.edu.pk\/HU-news\/habib-university-faculty-wins-award-at-karachi-literature-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Habib University Faculty Wins Award at Karachi Literature Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zain Saeed, Program Director and Assistant Professor Communication and Design has won the Getz Pharma<\/a> Award for his debut book \u2018Little America\u2019 at the recently concluded Karachi Literature Festival.<\/p>\n

The book follows Sharif Barkati, obsessed with \u201cAmerican\u201d ideas of love and freedom, and his investigation of the desire to create a public place where people are allowed to do whatever they want, free of the conservative gaze of Pakistani society. This, he envisions as Little America located on the Karachi coast. The novel questions the meaning of freedom and what can be sacrificed in its name.<\/p>\n

\u2018Little America\u2019 was launched in September 2021 at Habib University\u2019s campus and was met with praise. Speaking about winning the award at Karachi Literature Festival, Saeed said, \u201cIt was a massive surprise, I\u2019m still a little unsure of how to react. The literary community in Karachi has been really kind to me, so I\u2019m just trying to enjoy the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elaborating on his next steps, he mentioned that he has been invited to discuss the book at the Lahore Literary Festival. He is currently working on his second book which is set to be published in a month\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Saeed, who teaches a number of creative writing and literature courses at Habib University, earned his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has appeared in several publications including Glimmer Train<\/em> for which he wrote \u2018The Earth is a Stingy Bastard\u2019 in 2017. He has also written for the Hindu BL<\/em>ink and \u201cThe Man at the Window,\u201d and \u201cAll is Accommodation,\u201d for the Freiburg Review<\/em>. Saeed\u2019s research interests involve race, writing pedagogy, language change, as well as literature in English. He is also interested in the evolution of language in fiction.<\/p>\n

Fiction writing in English has a small pool of authors in Pakistan. The literary sphere suffers from a lack of good literature and writers. The question that comes up repeatedly is how to encourage Pakistani writers to keep our literary culture alive.<\/p>\n

Saeed advised, \u201cI would encourage them [writers]to try to tell stories about themselves, about who they are, their own experiences, about what it means to live in Pakistan for them. There are too many stories out there about the West and how it sees people in our part of the world, even from writers of Pakistani heritage, and we need to change that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zain Saeed, Program Director and Assistant Professor Communication and Design has won the Getz Pharma Award for his debut book \u2018Little America\u2019 at the recently concluded Karachi Literature Festival. The book follows Sharif Barkati, obsessed with \u201cAmerican\u201d ideas of love and freedom, and his investigation of the desire to create a public place where people<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7906,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-faculty"},"acf":{"home_page_thumbnail":7905,"category_select":"3","name_overwrite":""},"yoast_head":"\nHabib University Faculty Wins Award at Karachi Literature Festival -<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"HU's Zain Saeed wins Getz Pharma Award at Karachi Literature Festival for debut novel Little America, exploring freedom and identity in Pakistani society.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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