Authors

Soukeyna is a London-based writer, filmmaker and artist. She has written for Amaliah, Islam Channel, Hikayat, The Black Explorer Magazine, WAYF Journal, The Drinking Gourd, MZAB Magazine and has had her work exhibited at M Fest in London. An excerpt from her upcoming book of essays ‘Dispatches from the Realm’ was in 2025 longlisted for the Azhar Writing Prize. Soukeyna was also shortlisted for the Bloomsbury Mentorship Programme in 2025 for a magical realist novel she is currently working on titled ‘Dispossessions’. Her forthcoming play ‘The Shubz’, created and co-written by her, was selected for Deptford Scratch and will be performed in part in 2026. In her screenwriting, she was selected at the Tottenham Film Festival in 2025. Concerning her published writing, she is the author of a pamphlet of poetry with Lote Tree Press titled ‘All the Birds Were Invited to a Feast in the Sky’, included in the 2026 Muslim World Review and author of a self-published pamphlet titled ‘New Frontiers of a Hopeful Kind’. Her debut documentary feature, written, directed and produced by her, will screen in late August 2026. Soukeyna, finally, occasionally transforms her words into works of art through her arts website MULHIMA, which produces art prints, postcards, lino prints, ceramics, zines and more. 

More on her writing can be found on her website www.soukeynao.co.uk

Saaleh was raised in California - his ancestors hail from the conquered city-state of Haiderabad. After completing a six-year Dars-i-Nizami curriculum in South Africa (Azaadville), he turned his eye towards history, especially the house of Timur and the house of Osman. He has previously written long-form essays on the death of Urdu in America, and the hereditas of the Mughal polymath Shah Wali Allah and his heirs.

His literary interests are housed in both poetry and fiction. His upcoming novel, tentatively titled “The Last Saint,” explores the unease and stiffness of a wealthy Muslim family as they reckon with their ancestral and spiritual inheritance: what does it mean to bury the spiritual mysteries of your family in a bid to establish roots in the land of jazz and apple pie? Can one be a saint in modernity?

How do ancestors shape their descendants’ lives? Can one ever escape their ancestors, spiritual or genetic? Saaleh’s novel will ask us to reconsider free-will amid a storm of ancestors and saints.

He is currently pursuing a PhD at Harvard in the Department of History, where he studies Greek, Renaissance Italian, and Islamic Philosophy. He previously was at Darul Qasim College where he studied Ibn ‘Arabi and the Shahs under Shaykh Amin Kholwadia.

Qudsia’s poetry has appeared in the Acumen, Tupelo Quarterly, Poetry London, Wildness, Tower Poetry and has been commissioned by the New Creatives scheme. The poems examine the complexities surrounding the British-Pakistani experience. Khamoshi (2022) is her debut collection of poems by Verve Poetry Press which has been highly commended in the Forward Book of Poetry 2023. 

Her PhD focused on the resistive poetics of the Fourth Space as outlined in Threads (2018) by writers Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya, and Bhanu Kapil.

During studies at Salford, she has been interested in thinking about the ways in which innovation can lead conversations, ideas, and creative possibilities for bodies that are fixed in both political and social discourses. She now teaches poetry for The Northern Writing School at Level 4.

Nadine is a writer of literary fiction, and Fiction Editor at the Khidr Collective, a UK-based arts collective which curates and platforms original work from Muslim artists. Her debut novel Visitations explores the relationship between two estranged sisters during the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The story is a family drama set between the UK and Syria that ties secrets, grief and belonging together through both the sisters' personal lives and wider politics.

Bushra Mustafa-Dunne is an Iraqi-Irish writer, working between poetry, essay and fiction. Her poem “Keening with Rain / نواح المطر” was exhibited in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in spring 2026 as a sonic installation, and her poetry has been published by Lote Tree Press.