Maham is a human rights journalist from Pakistan. Before accepting the Neuffer Fellowship, Maham was working for Human Rights Watch, investigating labor rights of migrant workers in Qatar, ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2022. Her reporting is focused on gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. As Desk Editor at the Karachi-based Herald magazine, Maham won a national award for her reporting on ‘forced’ religious conversions of Hindu girls. While reporting for The News on Sunday in Lahore, Maham interviewed families accused of ‘honor killing’, investigated the country’s impending HIV crisis, and exposed abusive labor practices in beauty salons across Pakistan. Maham was nominated, two years in a row, for the Thomson Foundation Young Journalist Award in London, UK. In 2019, Maham launched a digital media website: Soch Writing. She also writes fiction and was awarded the 2019 ZHR Writing Prize for Women and was shortlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Maham has an MA from New York University, where her focus was documenting the lives of Waziris in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between 2004-14 when they were trapped between the Pakistani military and the Pakistani Taliban. Her reporting has been published by The Nation, Foreign Policy, DAWN, Al Jazeera English & America, The Diplomat, Naya Daur, and other publications.
