A Pakistani barrister who summons mist-laden manors, haunted consciences and the slow decay of power — writing “with the assurance of someone descended from the lineage of Emily Brontë and Edgar Allan Poe.”
A rare voice reviving gothic romance and Victorian horror from Karachi.
Sana Sharifuddin Pirzada is a Karachi-based barrister, human rights defender and one of the very few Pakistani authors devoted to gothic fiction — a genre long dominated by Western writers. Trained in law at King’s College London, the London School of Economics and Lincoln’s Inn, she channels a lifelong fascination with mystery and the macabre into atmospheric tales of love, control and moral reckoning.
Her imagination first stirred at the age of twelve, when she read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, only later realising it belonged to the gothic tradition. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and the great horror classics would follow her into a writing life that defies the geographic and realist conventions of most Pakistani Anglophone fiction.
To wield a gavel is to hold life and death — conscience and consequence — in one’s grasp. Power is a burden few men carry without decay.— The Gavel and the Lotus
Six volumes of shadow, suspense and Victorian unease.
A literary critic, Jonathan, travels from London to Winter Grange and falls for his landlady — only to find nothing is as it seems. Set between the world wars and fusing the spirit of Dracula and Rebecca.
Silver · Global Ebook Awards 2017A satisfying collection — a novella, two short stories and a narrative poem — venturing deeper into gothic shadowlands.
Bronze · Best Horror, Global Ebook 2019The barrister’s twin passions converge — a thriller that braids courtroom intrigue with Victorian darkness.
An atmospheric tale that earned the author wider recognition for her command of dread and suspense.
Nominated · UBL Literature Awards 2024Her fifth full-length work, continuing a singular oeuvre of haunting, morally charged storytelling.
Her darkest, most assured work. Through an epistolary confession from elderly Mark Finchley, a twenty-year-old secret unfolds in mist-laden Cornwall — a morality tale, psychological thriller and gothic horror in one. Written in just two weeks.
Where the domestic sphere becomes a locus of terror.
Pirzada’s fiction lingers on grief, obsession and the insidious ways in which love can curdle into control. Her characters are never purely good or evil; they vacillate between extremes, reminding readers of the intricacies of human nature. From the perspective of a brown, Pakistani writer revisiting Victorian England, her work quietly interrogates Empire, propriety and the fear of the ‘other.’
Send word across the mist — for enquiries, reviews and correspondence.
Or write directly to sanaspirzada@gmail.com