Safinah Danish Elahi, author of "The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon" in Conversation with Dur e Aziz Amna.

About the Book: 

Nominated for The 2023 Asian Prize for Fiction A contemporary South Asian drama of love, loss and trauma that transports you from the urban elites of Pakistan to the mountains of Peru and the hustle and bustle of London.

Zohaib, Misha, and Nadia were once inseparable, their childhood marked by fun and laughter. Yet the harmony shattered one fateful Karachi afternoon, laying bare divides they never saw coming.Years pass, but scars remain. Zohaib seeks solace in London, haunted by memories that refuse to fade. Meanwhile, Nadia has escaped the household where she first met Misha and Zohaib, but fate delivers her back to their door. As their paths collide, Nadia and Zohaib grapple with fragments of a past they're still piecing together.

The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon masterfully weaves a tapestry of emotions that spans continents and generations in a story of love that endures the ravages of time, healing that finds its way through the cracks, and pain that must be confronted to pave the way for a better tomorrow. With exquisite prose and vivid storytelling, Safinah Danish Elahi explores intricate layers of trauma, class division, and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit.

About the Author:

Safinah Danish Elahi is a lawyer, poet and novelist from Pakistan. She has earned her MFA in Publishing and Contemporary Fiction from Emerson College, Boston. Her poetry collection ‘The Unbridled Romance of Romance of Love and Pain’ was labeled epiphanic by the nations leading newspaper Dawn. Her debut novel, Eye on the Prize, published in 2020, translated into Urdu has been converted into a TV series. She is also the founder of an award winning publishing house, Reverie Publishers. She is a scholar at the International Writer’s Program with the University of Iowa Fall Residency 2022. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, her second novel, has been long-listed for the Asian Fiction Prize 2023.

About the Conversation Partner:

Dur e Aziz Amna is a writer based in Newark, NJ. Her debut novel, American Fever, won the SABA Award and the APALA Award for Literature. Her work has also appeared in the Financial Times, Aljazeera, Dawn, New York Times, and others. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Michigan's MFA program.