Hi, I’m Wasio Ali Khan Abbasi

While exploring blogging and covering events, I turned my attention to short stories. Tried my hand on a few and ended up publishing a couple on the blog. If I read them now, I would likely be horrified how bad a writer I was in the start.

As active part of DWL literary group, I attended their author meetup where they interview Aamer Hussein. I wrote about the event on my blog, and that blog led to conversation with Aamer Hussein that triggered my literary journey.

The River and the Tree was the first short story influenced by Aamer Hussein's writing (Another Gulmohar Tree), and he played a key role in improving the story. In 2018 the story found its home, getting published in the British magazine Critical Muslim. The earlier draft of this story was also responsible for securing admission at University of Southampton for MA in Creative Writing in 2015, an opportunity I missed due to visa issues. The same story secured me admission in Kingston University for the same program, but once again I could not go due to same visa issue.

The Hunter was a novel that came out of NaNoWriMo 2015 where I wrote 50k words of the story in the month of November. I soon completed the story, had it edited, sat on it for sometime before self-publishing it on Amazon Kindle.

This workshop was held before Covid lockdown entraped the whole world. My short story 'Closing Door' helped me get accepted for the workshop.