Shahnaz Habib is the author of the nonfiction book Airplane Mode (Catapault, forthcoming), and the translator of the novel Jasmine Days, for which she and the author Benyamin won the JCB Prize, India's most valuable prize for literature.

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, Creative Nonfiction, Agni, Brevity, The Guardian, and Afar. She has twice been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, and her work has been cited in the Best American Essays series multiple times.

Airplane Mode is a personal and cultural history of tourism from the perspective of a Third World-raised Muslim woman for whom travel has always been a complicated pleasure. Travel has long been tinted by the color of passports and skin, long before climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic changed the rules of travel. Airplane Mode traces the history of tourism, as a Euro-American mode of consumerism, while also charting my own personal journeys through which Shahnaz learned to question who gets to travel and who gets to write about travel. Threaded through the book is a rigorous yet playful analysis of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, expressways, the idea of wanderlust. Cumulatively, they tell a subversive history of how travel has been sold to us as a horizon-expanding, self-improving activity. Airplane Mode will be released in 2023 by Catapult.

Shahnaz teaches writing at The New School and Bay Path University, and consults for the United Nations.

Please visit Shahnaz’s Instagram, and Twitter for more information.