For the past six years, The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction has encouraged Pakistani short story writers to go above and beyond the realms of creativity to write everything from science fiction to steampunk, from magic realism to weird fiction.

The annual competition — established in 2017 in memory of Dr Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani to win the Nobel Prize for Physics — invites Pakistanis based anywhere in the world to share their inventive approaches to science fiction and fantasy.

Winners of the top three slots receive cash prizes and their short stories are featured on The Salam Award website. Additionally, they receive valuable guidance from publishing industry professionals, with opportunities for representation.

The winner of the 2022 award is Saher Hasnain, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Her story, ‘Children Always Come Home’, tells of a woman running a shoe shop during what could well be the end times.

The first runner-up is Umair Khan for ‘Takwir-al-Ghaib’ and the second runner-up is Bina Shah for her story ‘The Dogs of Justice’.

Others in the long list include ‘The Stone People’ by Hajra Omar, ‘Clarity’ by Zayna Rahman, ‘The Qawwal’ by Hasnain Nawab and ‘The Seven Degrees Celsius Mango’ by Effa Abid Shah.

The trio of judges evaluating this year’s entries were Eos’s own columnist Aamer Hussein; two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Novel, Paul Tremblay; and Shiv Ramdas, who has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards (and who took Twitter by storm with his tweets about a lorry full of rice, a sister going ballistic and a brother-in-law at his wits’ end).

Previous winners of the award include Firuza Pastakia for ‘The Universe is a Conscientious Gardener’; Akbar Shahzad for ‘Influence’; Kehkashan Khalid for ‘The Puppet Master’; Nihal Ijaz Khan for ‘The Smokecense of Pluvistan’; and Dur e Aziz Amna for ‘You Get What is Yours’.

To read all winning stories, learn more about the award and details of how to enter future competitions, readers are encouraged to visit www.thesalamaward.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 9th, 2022