Shahnaz Bashir is an award-winning author and academic from Kashmir in India. He was honoured with a university gold medal in journalism and was also awarded the Shamim Ahmad Shamim Memorial Kashmir Times Award 2007 for excelling in media studies. Literary critics have compared his short fiction with the great works of Anton Chekhov and Sadat Hassan Manto. His short stories, memoir essays, and reportage have been widely anthologized or published. Kashmir Life, a popular local weekly tabloid, in its Jan 2016 special issue, declared Shahnaz as "one of the eleven impact-makers from the entire 12 million population of Jammu & Kashmir". In April 2018, another leading local daily Kashmir Observer reported “Scattered Souls [by Shahnaz Bashir] is the best-selling fiction book in Kashmir to date”. That same year Shahnaz was awarded a Writer’s Research Residency in Switzerland by Pro Helvetia—the Swiss Arts Council in India. He teaches narrative journalism and creative writing to post-graduate students at the Central University of Kashmir. He is currently in the US and teaches and researches communicative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His forthcoming novel is The Disease.