Hibah Shabkhez

Hi! I'm Hibah Shabkhez, a multilingual writer and photographer based in Lahore, Pakistan. My creative and academic work is driven by a deep fascination with the intersections of language, literature, and lived experience. I serve on the staff of E&GJ Press and Pollux magazine, and I am also the editor-in-chief of Le Temps du FLE, the official magazine of the French Teachers' Association of Pakistan. In my spare time, I like to read - mostly novels, poetry, history, and philosophy, dabble in learning new languages, draw, listen to music from around the world, and weave whacky stories in my head using cross-lingual puns like ‘suffer’ in English vs ‘سفر’ (journey) in Urdu. Whether I am writing a poem, taking a photograph, or helping to put together a magazine, I am always searching for the quiet threads that connect people, places, and perspectives in unexpected ways. 

One book that haunts me is Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, especially the line, « le vice a été pour moi un vêtement ; maintenant il est collé à ma peau » (“vice was a garment for me; now it is glued to my skin”). Marcel Pagnol’s play Topaze is another spine-pricklingly relatable work, because the story could just as well have taken place in my own country. I have a soft spot for anything historical, from Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier to Edith Pargetter and Dorothy Dunnett, and spend quite a lot of time mentally comparing how different authors have written about the same eras, events, and people. But the literary connection that fascinates me the most is the uncanny resonance between Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Alice Werner’s Bannerman of the Dandenong, two works from entirely different genres that tell essentially the same story of self-sacrificial love with protagonists who could scarcely be more different otherwise.

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