5 Questions with Raaza Jamshed
Raaza Jamshed’s writing appears in Guernica, Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books and Australian Book Review. She holds a doctorate in Creative Arts from Western Sydney University where she is an Adjunct fellow. Her short story, ‘Miracle Windows’, won the second prize for 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Prize.
In 2021, Raaza launched Guernica magazine’s Global Spotlights series as a fiction editor. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Hedgebrook and Banff Centre for Arts and Literature. Raaza migrated to Australia from Pakistan in 2008.
Her debut novel is What Kept You? (Giramondo, 2025).
No.1
What did you read growing up, and how do you think your reading tastes have evolved over time?
These days there’s a call to read non-western writers as a way of widening one’s horizon. I think I did the opposite.
I know you’re asking about literary writing, but for me, non-literary writing—especially newspapers—was formative. Growing up, there was no screen time, so any page mattered. My adults tried to shield me from the world’s harsher news, which only made newspapers feel forbidden. I remember reading them in secret, [and] how transgressive it felt.
In our house, there was a big black book of poetry full of mythical references and folktales that I had memorised almost cover-to-cover by the age of ten. My mom would ask me to recite from it for visitors. And then there was the small school library, where I devoured books by English authors I’ve never heard of since. I [would] read [them] one after another, almost at random, like drawing lots. Whatever came my way became literature to me.
After school, for a few years, I turned almost exclusively to South Asian writers—giants like Bapsi Sidhwa, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri—who gave me a way to locate myself on the page. In the last decade, though, I’ve sought out fiction by western writers as a counterweight. But I find myself most drawn to female writers—Alexis Wright, Helen Oyeyemi—who keep surprising me with what fiction can do.
In the last few years, I’ve also been reading works of feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva … the list is long. Their arguments intersect and reshape my thinking in ways that feel equally satisfying as fiction, though in a different register.
No.2
You have published many short stories over the years, and in 2019 you were shortlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize for your story, ‘Miracle Windows’. As a significantly longform project, how did this debut novel come together?
It began with ‘Concinnity: An Awkward Digressions’, published in Meanjin in the Winter 2019 issue. That was only my second published story, but I think the seed of the novel lies there. I had started that story with the idea of awkwardness—the awkwardness a migrant feels in a western country, or a woman in a patriarchal world—and from there it opened into the question of return: a return to a homeland, to an unfettered self. Is that even possible?
After that, all my short stories began circling the same question. It felt like a vortex at the centre of my mind, and pulled all my writing projects into it. I think it was with a sense of abandon that I finally decided to immerse myself in the world of this book, and see where it would lead me. At the time, I was doing my DCA at the Writing and Research Society [at the University of Western Sydney], so the manuscript became part of my thesis. The final draft looks very different from the initial drafts but the formal framework—the deadlines, the pressure—helped me impose the discipline I needed to complete this book.
No.3
What Kept You? is very voice-driven. How did you discover this particular voice, and how did you keep the consistency throughout the novel?
I think the voice of the novel was shaped as much by what was happening in the world as by how I felt about the world. The book began during what was called Australia’s Black Summer [in 2019–2020]. The fires burned more than 24,000 hectares of land—it was one of the most catastrophic fire seasons on record. An estimated 3 billion animals were killed or displaced. 6 per cent of the state burned. That grief sat with me when I began to imagine the novel.
And then the pandemic hit. Suddenly there was this virus; elusive yet intimate, a grief disease. It felt global but also strangely personal, as if it knew your weaknesses and came for them. During the pandemic, we learned what it meant to be cut off from ritual—from the death bed, from the last goodbye. Exile, whether chosen or enforced, disorients your story; it alters who you believe yourself to be. I wanted the voice of this novel to be a place where mourning could still happen, and perhaps what I was doing in this book was attempting to return to our rituals—to address the dead, to sit with the dying, to create a ritual in language where older rituals had been snatched away.
That dread of the virus also drew me back to earlier times in my life, and to the lives of the girls I grew up with. I realised fear is not just an emotion but a condition of womanhood. It shapes how we talk, how we scan for exits, how we quicken our steps at night. Isn’t the classic Red Riding Hood strolling to her grandmother’s tale really about fear? But I wanted to insist that hypervigilance—this attunement to atmosphere and threat—can be a kind of a counter-weapon.
[And] that’s where I find myself in conversation with ecofeminist thought: Haraway, and Kristeva’s writing on abjection—the body’s borders, its vulnerability, its refusal to forget what the world would rather erase. Women’s fear isn’t abstract; it’s somatic, it’s intelligent. For Jahan, fear becomes a form of storytelling, and, in some ways, metamorphosis. I also wanted to tell a story unapologetically centred on this one character, a woman deeply absorbed in the work of undoing the knots in her mind.
In that sense, it’s a girl story, and I think I wrote it with a slow-burn rage. And even as I wrote about grief, fear, ecology, exile, and female rage, I wanted the story to remain specific, grounded in details. For me, that’s where truth lives, and that’s where the voice of this book found its consistency.
No.4
You’re also the Interviews and Global Spotlights editor at Guernica. Do you think this role intersects with your novel-writing at all?
Of course. Everything one does in life will, somehow—miraculously, ridiculously, cosmically—find its way into the world of a novel. I’ve witnessed this kind of magic in all my writing projects.
Guernica is an extraordinary space where literature and global politics merge. Working on the Interviews [section] for Guernica keeps me attuned to the breath of the world, if I can put it that way. And in the Global Spotlights series, I’m always searching for voices that exist beyond the western corridor, and that search has, in a way, given courage to my own language. It’s given me the confidence to push against inherited norms, and to remap sentences so that they would carry different linguistic cadences. I tried to bring that same defiance into writing What Kept You?, and to create a voice that felt authentic to a character moving in-between cultures and languages.
No.5
On that note, What Kept You? floats between English, Arabic and Urdu, the three languages that your protagonist, Jahan, knows—and presumably you as well. It is often said that we inhabit different mindsets and/or personalities when writing and speaking in different languages. Can you speak more to this in relation to the novel?
I wanted the novel to allow for those different linguistic worlds to meet—to collide, even—and to see what kind of voice might emerge from that encounter. There were some sections where I felt that only the cadence of Urdu could do [the work] justice. I formulated them in Urdu first, then translated them into English. Certain words carried reverence, certain scenes needed to be dealt with in the spirit of sacredness, and for those I let the Arabic stand, because of the power I perceive in it. I wanted the English text to bear that haunting, [for it] to be ghosted by other languages, allowing their turns of phrase to slip in with all their awkwardness. At some point you ask yourself: what do we write for, if not to say, this is how it felt to me—can you see it?
That ghosting was important to tell this story, which I sensed was bonsai-like, a presence with ghost limbs. In my everyday life I don’t code-switch easily. My words, in the face of incomprehension, often feel defanged, declawed. But in the world of the book, I wanted the ghost to appear, flickering in and out, in the form of words foreign to English. My hope was that those words wouldn’t simply register as alien, but might take root, might even become part of the reader’s lexicon.
This story is also about the multiplicities within any self—the way we look back at a younger version of ourselves with contempt, or the way we look down at a mother tongue once another language has become dominant. It’s such a common reflex, but there’s a violence in it that I saw my protagonist stepping away from.
The novel also centers a brown couple of different ethnicities, something I rarely see represented in English literature. This relationship didn’t map neatly onto a white/coloured binary, and for me, language was the most honest way to capture that collision of worlds: not through easy labels, but through texture, rhythm, and the friction of words moving against one another.
(Credit: Elena Tanska)
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A coming-of-age story set in a world marked by political turmoil and the threat of violence, What Kept You? is the powerful debut novel by Raaza Jamshed.
As a child in Pakistan, Jahan was raised on her grandmother’s stories, influenced by the demons of folklore and the memory of violence and forced displacement caused by the British partition of India – tales that taught her to be wary of the world. But her grandmother’s life, filled with quiet defiance, hints at another truth. Jahan rebels against the constraints she lives under as a young woman growing up in Lahore, and migrates to Australia, where she meets her husband, whose family is from the Middle East. As she reckons with the unruliness of her body after a miscarriage, and the bushfires which threaten their home and horses on the rural outskirts of Sydney, she is forced to confront the violence that haunts her, against women, animals, and in nature.
A feminist anti-tale, written in a uniquely expressive voice that floats between English, Urdu and Arabic, What Kept You? explores survival, metamorphosis, and the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending.
Get it from Giramondo here.