Emma Al-Rashid is a British-Pakistani novelist and historian born in 1987 in Bradford and raised between West Yorkshire and Lahore. She studied South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and earned an MPhil from the University of Cambridge on colonial print culture in Punjab. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Wasafiri, The Manchester Review, and the journal Punjab Past & Present.
Emma writes richly researched fiction that braids archival traces, oral histories, and intimate lives; her interests range across labor, borders, and the afterlives of documents, often blending historical inquiry with the textures of romance and memory. Her debut novel, Mutiny at Ravi (2024), explored canal colonies and colonial bureaucracy in the early twentieth century. Alongside her long-form work, her short fiction received the Calderdale New Voices Award and was shortlisted for the River North Prize.
She teaches part-time at the University of Salford and volunteers with an oral-history collective archiving South Asian diaspora life in the north of England. She divides her year between Manchester and Lahore and is continuing research for The Canal Ledger, a hybrid project about rivers, borders, and the printed word, while pursuing new historical narratives rooted in everyday lives and the records they leave behind.
