Samira Shackle is a freelance writer and reporter based in London. She writes long-form narrative features that focus on the human impact of major world events. She is currently deputy editor at the New Humanist, a quarterly magazine of ideas, and a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read. For the past eight years, she has reported regularly from Pakistan, her mother’s homeland, covering stories from the Taliban’s attack on polio vaccinators to the army’s harsh repression of a civil rights group. Samira has also reported from the UK, the Middle East and Africa, with a particular focus on religious extremism and minority groups. She has twice been a media fellow with Columbia University’s Centre for the Study of Social Difference; in 2016 she was awarded the Times’ Richard Beeston bursary for foreign reporting; and in 2018 she won the inaugural Portobello Prize with the proposal for her first book.
At MacDowell, she completed the manuscript for that book, Karachi Vice. A work of narrative non-fiction, Karachi Vice was published by Granta. It tells the story of five ordinary citizens of Pakistan's largest city, and their lives amidst urban conflict.
