About
Wasima Khan is a writer and poet, born and raised in the Netherlands to Pakistani immigrants. She is the winner of the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize and the 2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in over a dozen U.S. literary journals, such as About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, Sky Island Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, and The Good Life Review, and has been nominated for Best New Poets 2026. She serves as a fiction reader for Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.
Wasima has won first prizes in four essay competitions organized by the Global Peter Drucker Forum, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Dutch Advisory Board on Regulatory Burden, and second prize in the 2025 Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition co-organized by Global Financial Integrity, Academics Stand Against Poverty and Yale’s Global Justice Program.
Her journalism has appeared in Dutch newspapers Trouw and de Volkskrant, as well as on the investigative platform Follow the Money. Previously, Wasima authored a law dictionary and worked as a law lecturer and legislative lawyer. A first-generation college graduate, she holds a LL.B. degree in Tax Law and LL.M. degrees in Tax Law and Financial Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Interviews
Author Q&A with Wasima Khan The Good Life Review (April 2026)
“Writing is a powerful way to cultivate empathy and understanding. It allows me to step into other people’s lives and worlds, and I hope to bring readers along on that journey.
At the same time, it is a way for me to reclaim agency over my own life and experiences. Too often, I have been confronted with Western biases – simplistic narratives about me, Muslim women, or Muslims more broadly – stories in which I barely recognize myself. In my own work, I aim to foreground nuance and emotional complexity as a way of challenging those assumptions.”
Author Profile: Wasima Khan Willow Springs Magazine (April 2026)
“When I write, I’m naturally drawn to music that feels close to what I want for my poems. In the evenings, I listen to the legendary Nina Simone, whose voice carries the sense of someone revealing and concealing hard truths at the same time. Some nights I let Arooj Aftab fill the room.”
