Zeenat Hisam is an independent writer-researcher and translator based in Karachi, Pakistan. Over the span of her career, she has written extensively on labour, gender and social development issues. She undertook an assessment of business and human rights in the Thar Coal projects (2025), developed a safeguarding policy (2024) and conducted evaluation of projects for a number of not-for-profit organisations working on community infrastructure development (2023), urban development (2022), women and child healthcare; women’s empowerment; women prisoners; women and crisis management in the Karachi violence; and the campaign against honour killings in the 2000s and 1990s. Her published works include a number of research reports, a couple of books, articles, book reviews, travelogues, personal essays and literary translations .
Ms. Hisam has worked as a literary translator and editor over the years. Her recent work of translation from English into Urdu, Tammanao kay Diyaar mein, published in January 2025, is a collection of 88 poems by 20 North American women poets. She also translated a selection of poems by Bulgarian poet Lyubomir Levchev. Ms. Hisam translated Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend (first part published in quarterly Aaj, Issue 122, December 2023), Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (2021), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (2020), and a selection of short stories from world literature (2007), which includes the writings of Yusuf Idris, A.B. Yehushua, Donald Barthelme, Quim Monzo, Italo Calvino and Daniel Alarcon. She has also translated Urdu short stories of Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, and Shafiqur Rehman into English. She served as Executive Editor of the Urdu literary quarterly magazine Aaj from 1989 to 2004.
Zeenat writes on labour in the opinion pages of the national daily newspaper Dawn. Previously, she was associated with the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER), Karachi from 2003 to 2016. Prior to joining the development sector, Zeenat worked with Dawn (1980-1991) as a full-time journalist, and later served for a year as a member of the launching team of The News.
Zeenat wrote weekly column titled Diary of a Feminist on women’s issues in daily Star, an English-language evening newspaper (1981-82) for two years. She edited bi-monthly Urdu wall newspaper on environment and sustainable development, Hamara Mahoul (Our Environment) for Shirkatgah Women’s Resource Centre (1993-94).
Zeenat has a Master’s degree in Development Studies, specialising in Women and Development, from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, the Netherlands (1987-88). She also holds a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Karachi.
Zeenat Hisam 