Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, was published in five territories (Random House - India, HarperCollins - United States, Jonathan Cape - UK, Editions Stock - France, Carl Hanser Verlag - Germany), and was translated into French and German. The novel was awarded the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Chautauqua Prize. It garnered positive reviews in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Tanweer's translation of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar's collection of novellas and stories was published in 2016 as Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures. This translation was one of the eleven recipients of the American PEN Translation Fund Grant.
Bilal Tanweer is the founder of the ³Ô¹ÏÍ·Ìõ Young WritersWorkshop. This fully-funded, five-day summer workshop has played a vital role in nurturing and inspiring the next generation of writers in Pakistan, providing them with the resources and support to pursue their creative aspirations. The workshop offers young writers mentorship, space to experiment, and a community for their writing. Over the years, the workshop has seen remarkable success stories, including a recipient of the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, several writers admitted to fully-funded MFA programs, with some whose works have been published in magazines such as The New Yorker.
Bilal Tanweer’s distinguished fellowships include the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and the University of Iowa's International Writers Program. In 2023, he served as the Chair of Jury for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Recently, he worked with Pauline Fan, a writer, literary translator and cultural researcher from Malaysia on a year-long project for Commonwealth Foundation to curate and edit literary works from across South and Southeast Asia for .