
Zeenat Hisam
Zeenat Hisam is a Karachi-based independent researcher-writer, editor, and translator. Her interest in Urdu and world literature as a reader, spans decades. Earlier, she translated a few Urdu short stories (by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, and Shafiqur Rehman) into English. Her first collection of short stories, translated from English into Urdu, Mohr-e-Sukoot (2007), contains writings of Yusuf Idris, A.B. Yehoshua, Donald Barthelme, Kim Monzo, Italo Calvino, and Daniel Alarcón, first published in Aaj quarterly. She translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (2020) and Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (2021). Ms. Hisam translated several poems of Lyubomir Levchev, a great Bulgarian poet, before proceeding to the translation of North American women’s poetry. Currently, she is about to finish translating Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first novel of her famous Neapolitan tetralogy.
Professionally, Zeenat Hisam has been involved in action research on labour. Gender, community development, and minority issues are her other areas of interest. Her published works include research reports, articles, book reviews, and essays in journals and mainstream media. She holds a Master’s in Development Studies, specializing in Women and Development, from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, the Netherlands.