South African author Shubnum Khan has been accepted into the Casa Ecco residency program on Lake Como, Italy. Khan shared the news on Instagram, “I always thought a husband was going to take me around the world. Turns out it was my writing,” she wrote, adding that she had been sitting with the news for months, too astounded to share it. Khan also noted she has never been to Italy but has always dreamed of going.

Casa Ecco is a historic 19th-century villa operated by the Hawthornden Foundation, set on a sixty-acre estate in Griante. The residency program offers writers six uninterrupted weeks to focus on their work in progress. Writers receive private accommodations with workspace, three meals daily, and a stipend of one thousand dollars for European-based writers or twenty-five hundred dollars for those traveling from elsewhere. The program hosts six to eight writers at a time from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. No demands are made on residents’ time during their stay.

The Hawthornden Foundation was founded by Drue Heinz (1915-2018) in 1982 as a charitable organization dedicated to supporting contemporary writers and the literary arts. Heinz was publisher of The Paris Review from 1993 to 2007, co-founded Ecco Press in 1971, and established the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1981. The Foundation operates residency programs at three locations: Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, Casa Ecco in Italy, and Hawthornden Brooklyn in New York. The Foundation also administers the Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain’s oldest literary prizes, originally founded in 1919 and revived in 1987.

Khan is the author of The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, which became a USA Today bestseller and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. The novel won the HSS Award for Best Novel and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. It has been translated into Italian and Ukrainian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Her previous works include the essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Stock Photo and her debut novel Onion Tears, which was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Fiction Prize. Khan serves as a board member at Imbiza Journal for African Writing and mentors at Led By Foundation.

Congratulations to Shubnum Khan on this achievement!