Farah Ahamed

Farah Ahamed's short fiction and essays has been published in Ploughshares,The Massachusetts Review, Comma Press, and Kwani?. Her stories are bound by an overall sense of oppression and rebellion and explore how culture, religion, and politics constrain and determine the lives of her characters. The stories range in time from the early days of independence in East Africa to the present.

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Recently she was shortlisted for the Primadonna Festival Writing Award, and longlisted for the Canadian CBC Books Short Story Award. Previously, she was joint winner of the inaugural Gerald Kraak Award and highly commended in the London Short Story Prize. Her essays and stories have been shortlisted for the Thresholds Essay Prize, Screen Craft Prize, SI Leeds Literary Prize, DNA/Out of Print Award, and The Asian Writer Short Story Prize. She has been nominated for The Pushcart and Caine prizes.

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Farah is a lawyer with a Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She was born in Kenya and has lived in Nairobi, Vancouver, Kampala, London and Bilbao. She is currently between London and Lahore, working on a short story collection inspired by Lahore. She is also compiling an anthology on menstruation experiences in South Asia which will be published by Pan Macmillan, India.

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Her Udemy course 'Read like a writer and write a short story' can be found here.