Blade or Balm

An Interview with Hannan Khan by Clara Zimban

With a fearless voice shaped by the landscapes and cultural cadences of Kot Muzaffar, Hannan Khan stands as the Grand Prize Winner of the Native Voice Award 2025. We connected with the Pakistani writer to discuss his top-ranking poetry collection, Isn’t Cooked Is Cursed and his response to coming out on top of this global writing competition. 

Hannan Khan

“I read the announcement email thrice,” Khan begins, “first with disbelief, second with panic (because who trusts ecstasy at first sight?) and third with a quiet awe—like stencilling your own pulse.

“Winning Native Voices Award 2025 wasn’t just a trophy moment for me, it was a testimony that words whispered in hushedness, scribbled on scrapes between electricity breakdowns, could resonate loud enough to traverse oceans.”

Khan’s poetry resonated so strongly that we felt drawn to discover the man behind the stanzas, and in our interview, he was just as candid in his responses to our questions.

What culture does your award-winning work represent, and how does it connect with you personally?

“My collection depicts Pakistani culture, but not the glossy postcards of mangoes and Mughal gardens. They illustrate the culture of stashed bruises, of laughter seamed over grief, of resilience masquerading as routine. And personally? I’m both the scion and beholder of this soil. Every line I penned was me striving to both betray and honor the place that fashioned me—betray its quietude and honor its scars.”

Discuss the artistry behind the work.

“The title itself is a proverb I choreographed out of lived irony,  because in Asian cultures, what isn’t kneaded into silence, what isn’t swallowed, what isn’t cooked into routine is immediately branded as sinful, shameful, baneful.

“Artistically, Isn’t Cooked is Cursed morphed into my laboratory. I was testing how metaphors of food, ritual and inheritance could be twisted until they exposed violence underneath. If silence is what tradition keeps trying to cook us into, then my pieces are the uncooked protest—dangerous, unpalatable, but vital.

Your word choices feel so deliberate studied, meaningful—almost like you’re encoding your poems with a secret language only you can fully decipher. What artistic purpose lies behind your particular use of language?

“For me, lingo is never neutral. It’s either a blade or a balm and sometimes both in the same breath.

“I blossomed in a culture where polite words are often lies. Where textbooks sterilized desire, where weddings wrapped remorse in marigold garlands, where men were bidden to carry mountains on their ribs but never cry. If society craves language to soothe and hide, I crave mine to expose and sting. 

“I’m constantly smuggling smothered realities into words. My intention isn’t simply to bedazzle or narrate—it’s to disrupt. To make words taste heavy, to forge them sting, to fashion them linger as aftertaste long after the page has turned.”

The body in your poetry is inescapably present: the body is a vessel, the body is grotesque, and it is often a burden because sex and gender are attached to it in the most visible ways. What relationship with the body did you want to explore in this collection?

In this collection, I wanted to expose how culture endlessly ‘cooks’ the body—kneading it into a daughter’s honor, grading it in classrooms, adorning it for weddings, exploiting it in intimacy, and in the end game, silencing it under the heft of masculinity. So, the relationship I craved exploring is one of confrontation, not consolation.

“I wanted readers to feel how grotesque it is to summon beauty from bruises, silence from remorse, obedience from gashes.”

You explore the relationship between the sacred and the profane, beauty and horror, especially the way these notions are reproduced through institutions like school, family, and marriage. Why is this topic central to your art, and, I imagine, to your feminism?

“I don’t pen to scandalize faith or tradition: I pen to ventilate them. 

“My feminism isn’t a podium speech: it’s house-bred, and field-tested. Kitchens, classrooms and marriage stages are the theatres where bodies are negotiated every day. The sacred isn’t my enemy—the impunity is. For me, the profane is anything that demands a person amputate their voice in order to belong.

“And yes, I’m a man voicing this. Patriarchy frames men as security guards for a vault that imprisons and  suffocates them, too.

Can you tell us about your journey as a writer? When did this practice find you?

“The truth? Writing didn’t exactly find me. It stalked me. Saying it ‘started’ there feels too simple. It was always orbiting me, loitering for the right season to land.”

“Life has a way of orchestrating us toward what we are meant to inherit and it was that inheritance for me. My father wrote poetry in Urdu. So, I suppose it’s also inherited the way eye color is inherited. Not a choice, but a destiny cyphered in blood.”

Finally, is there anything else you’d like us to know—about this collection, your wider body of work, or yourself?

“First, my deepest thanks to Monique Franz, whose vision fashions Kinsman more than a magazine. It’s a sanctuary. And to Clara Zimban—I truly appreciate you for reading my work,  not as text, but as testimony. For posing questions that feel like doors rather than strangled fences. As poets, we often send our words out like messages in bottles, hoping someone unearths them. Kinsman not only unearthed mine, they built a lighthouse around them. 

“I’ll close with a hearty dedication to Kinsman for sculpting my raw words into a radiant signal: ‘I shipped a handful of poems & Kinsman morphed them into a seraphic constellation—now even my commas feel famous.’”  —Hannan Khan

Read Khan's captivating poem "Halwa for Hymen" from his award-winning collection.

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Clara Zimban is a French writer and aspiring journalist of Guadeloupean descent. Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol, she has a keen interest in exploring the intersections of culture and politics. Clara contributes to various online publications and local news outlets in France and abroad, and she also writes for Kinsman Quarterly.

Her published works include Gwoka: Beauty on the Shoulders of Pain and Rhetoric: The Role of Rhetoric in Shaping Immigration Policy, among several other essays and articles that highlight her focus on cultural identity, political discourse, and social justice.