Home Was Never a Place. It Was Always a Story
Twenty-Four Queer South Asian Writers Tell Theirs
On the Brink of Belief challenges Borders, Faith, and the Limits of Belonging. It does not seek your permission. It does not ask to be understood in fragments or footnotes. Instead, this incendiary new anthology of queer writing from South Asia edited by acclaimed poet and thinker Kazim Ali—insists on its full complexity. It arrives as both offering and provocation, gathering the voices of emerging LGBTQIA+ writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, who speak across the fault lines of faith, identity, caste, desire, and dislocation. Together, they break borders, unravel shame, and rewrite what it means to be queer, South Asian, and, for many, Muslim in a world that insists on false binaries and erasure.
Born from The Queer Writers’ Room, a pioneering literary incubator led by The Queer Muslim Project, this anthology shatters the silence imposed on queer South Asian lives, particularly those shaped by layered experiences of caste, gender, displacement, and inherited silence. These stories don’t beg for inclusion. They claim space-unruly, and sacred.
The result is a literary document as fractured and luminous[1] as the subcontinent itself—poetry, memoir, speculative fiction and essays that tilt language off its axis and refuse to flatten queerness into performance or protest. These are not stories that beg for visibility. They demand space. They carry within them the breathless beauty of risk.
Emerging from The Queer Writers’ Room, a literary initiative by The Queer Muslim Project in collaboration with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the anthology redefines South Asian literary canons. With mentorship from Kazim Ali, Darius Stewart and Maggie Millner, the twenty-four writers in this collection interrogate everything from intergenerational grief and gendered violence to queer rituals, ecological collapse, and erotic joy.
What does it mean to be queer and Muslim in a world increasingly hostile to both? What does it mean to write from and into the peripheries, from small towns and queer bodies that have been trained to disappear?
On the Brink of Belief does not offer tidy resolutions. Instead, it gives readers a mirror to see queerness not as anomaly, but as archive and architecture. Its stories refuse assimilation and, instead, forge kinship across borders—real, imagined, and imposed.
With urgent contributions from new and overlooked voices—including Birat Bijay Ojha, Dia Yonzon, Isurinie Anuradha Mallawaarachchi, Amama Bashir, Mesak Takhelmayum, and Kaleemullah Bashir—this is a landmark collection that resists nostalgia and embraces rupture.
Kazim Ali’s introduction unspools like scripture rewritten: part essay, part memoir, part invocation. It reminds us that the gods like queer writers have always slipped categories. They have always rewritten belief on their own terms.
Advanced Praise
‘This book has language, music and pulse wild enough to queer into shape new realities that will haunt and seduce. It harvests genres that are mischievous, intimate, confessional, dreamy, everything on the steep cliff of the possible’
—Saikat Majumdar, author & critic
‘A brave attempt by The Queer Muslim Project to bring together little-known writers from underrepresented communities, especially South Asian Muslims, writing about their lives and loves in difficult circumstances’
—Ruth Vanita, author of Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India
About the Editor
Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist whose acclaimed work spans genres and continents. He currently teaches literature at the University of California, San Diego, and is widely known for his writing at the intersection of mysticism, identity, and diaspora.
On the Brink of Belief
Publishing June 2025 | Penguin India
