Usama Lali
Judge – 2025 Abida Rauf Poetry Award
Usama Lali is a writer, filmmaker and educator with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Washington, Seattle. During his time there, he taught undergraduate creative writing courses for two years. He is currently based in Lahore and teaches courses on life writing, multilingualism, and screenwriting at LUMS. Lali is a recipient of the David Guterson Award ’23 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize ’23 (link to story: www.addastories.org/khicheenk).
His work spans multiple languages (English, Urdu, and Punjabi) and forms (prose, screenplay and poetry) and is published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Adda Stories, Aleph Review, Pancham, among others. He can be found on intagram @usamalali
