Some people find literature. I think literature found me first.
I grew up with books in one hand and questions in the other, the kind of questions that don’t have clean answers. Why do some stories feel like they were written specifically for you? Why does a poem by a woman in London make you feel so completely seen? Why does language, when it’s wielded by the right hands, feel like resistance?
Those questions never left. They became a thesis. They became this website.
I’m Filza Riaz: a writer, researcher, and Gold Medalist in English Literature.
I’m currently completing my MPhil, where my research focuses on the political poetics of resistance in two minor poets: how they use language to push back against erasure, forced silence, and the violence of borders. Before that, I was a Gold Medalist, which is a fancy way of saying I have always taken reading very seriously.
I’ve also ghostwritten over a hundred books — fiction, self-help, psychology, memoir — for international clients who trusted me with their most personal stories. I’ve published academic papers, presented at literary conferences, and spent more hours than I should admit thinking about a single Nabokov sentence.
The Filza is where all of that converges.
What You’ll Find Here
Book reviews that go further than plot into why a book was written, what it’s really arguing, and why it lands the way it does. I cover world literature broadly, with particular attention to writers whose work gets called “regional” by people who haven’t read them: Elif Shafak, Warsan Shire, Olga Tokarczuk, Gabriel García Márquez, Arundhati Roy, and many more. The Western canon, too, I read Nabokov and Kafka and Handke with the same attention.
Original poetry and short fiction. This is where I write for myself, and you’re invited.
— Filza
Want to Work Together?
I take on ghostwriting, academic writing, content strategy, book reviews for publishers, and SEO writing. See the full details on the Work With Me page.
filza@thefilza.com
