Board of Trustees/ Team
South Asia Speaks Foundation has appointed a board of trustees for a five-year term, alongside a dedicated team of members. The board will provide strategic leadership and expand outreach to traditionally underrepresented voices, while the team focuses on implementing initiatives to strengthen the foundation’s mentorship program.
Fatima Bhutto
Fatima Bhutto studied at Columbia University, New York, and at SOAS in London. Her books include Songs Of Blood And Sword, an account of her family and Pakistani politics, and the novels The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon and The Runaways. Her latest book is New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop. She lives in Karachi, Pakistan.
Isaac Chotiner
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A.
Sonia Faleiro
Sonia Faleiro is the author of The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021), which was nominated for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (2010), which was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage. She is the founder and program director of South Asia Speaks.
Rajni George
Consultant
Rajni George has been a senior editor at Penguin Random House, a reader at Granta, fiction and poetry editor at The Caravan, and a consultant for the United Nations. She is founding editor of The Kodai Chronicle and Sky Islands, publications from the Western Ghats in India. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New Internationalist, Pleiades and Mint Lounge, among other publications. She lives in Kodaikanal, India.
Rahul Bhatia
Project Director, SAS X Reportagen
Rahul Bhatia is an award-winning writer and journalist based in Mumbai, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, Guardian Long Reads, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Wall Street Journal. His profiles and cultural features for The Caravan magazine in India have been anthologised, and his technology investigations are studied at Stanford and other universities. He was on the Reuters global investigations team, where he focused on religion, business, and technology. He mentors writers and journalists as part of South Asia Speaks, and was a co-founder of the Peepli Project, a journalism nonprofit. He was a 2022-2023 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Zehra Shabbir Khan
Program Assistant
Zehra Shabbir Khan is an undergraduate student of fine art, majoring in drawing and printmaking. Her academic and artistic interests lie in South Asian history and migration studies, and she writes poetry, stage plays and short stories. Zehra is currently working on her debut novel, set against the backdrop of the 1971 Partition of Pakistan. You can read her work here and follow her studio practice here. She lives in Karachi, Pakistan.