Syed Kashif Raza
About the Person
Syed Kashif Raza was born on 10 May 1973; he is married and lives in Karachi. He has worked for various media outlets and has been Senior Producer/Executive Producer at the news channel Geo News since 2008. He has taken part in numerous conferences in Pakistan, at the Rekhta Literature Festival in Delhi and at the Global Media Forum in Bonn, has organised literary events himself, and has worked as a tutor at various writing workshops. He is the editor of the literary magazine Karachi Review.
In Pakistan, Syed Kashif Raza is well known as an intellectual, journalist and TV editor, as a literary critic, as a poet, and — since his first novel Vier Derwische und eine Schildkröte [Four Dervishes and a Tortoise] (in the Urdu original cār darweš aur ek kachuā) — also as a novelist. He is also active as a translator: among the authors whose works he has rendered into Urdu are Arundhati Roy, Muhammad Hanif and Maniza Naqvi, along with texts by James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende and others. He translated Noam Chomsky's interview collection 9-11, on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the US-critical book The Culture of Terrorism.
The list of authors he has translated hints at the breadth of his interests, spanning literature as well as politics, history, philosophy and film. Besides Urdu he is also fluent in Punjabi, Sindhi and English, enjoys learning foreign languages, and loves to travel.
Literary Work
Syed Kashif Raza earned his reputation as a major author above all as a poet. Collections of his poetry appeared in 2003 (Muḥabbat kā maḥall-e vuqūʹ) and 2012 (Mamnūʹ mausamõ kī kitāb). His poems have been translated into English, Arabic, Hindi and Sindhi. In 2022 he co-edited an anthology that engaged, in image and text, with the experience of the coronavirus pandemic (Between Quarantine and Quest).
Vier Derwische und eine Schildkröte [Four Dervishes and a Tortoise] is Syed Kashif Raza's first novel. It appeared in 2018, won the UBL Prize for Best Fiction in 2020, and made the shortlist for the literary prize of the Karachi Literature Festival.
The novel's protagonists, the four "dervishes", each tell their own stories. The journalist Javed Iqbal owns the tortoise Archimedes and is a man in search of the ideal woman; yet his attempts to get close to real women remain stuck in voyeurism. His half-brother, the equally popular and conscientious philosophy professor Aftab Javed, has never had a relationship. By contrast, Iqbal Muhammad Khan, a charming servant of love and poetry, is exceedingly successful with women. Finally there is the unfortunate, universally bullied village boy Bala, who falls under the influence of Islamist terrorists.
The framework of the plot is formed by two historical bomb attacks on Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. For Vier Derwische und eine Schildkröte is both a political and a philosophical book. Alongside the voices of the four dervishes there is the voice of the narrator as a metafictional element, as well as the voice of the tortoise — a timeless, socially invisible yet all-knowing purveyor of mocking commentary. The novel is a clever and witty literary work, a commentary on Pakistan's current situation, and a manifesto against the system's deepening religious and social intolerance and violence.
Almuth Degener
Published in German
- Vier Derwische und eine Schildkröte [Four Dervishes and a Tortoise]. Novel. Translated by Almuth Degener. Draupadi Verlag 2024, 288 pp. (in German)
Excerpt
Readings with Syed Kashif Raza: see Readings (in German) (May 2025 reading tour).
Further Links
- Syed Kashif Raza at Rekhta (Urdu literature archive)
- Syed Kashif Raza at the Karachi Literature Festival