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.
Hey! 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 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 are where I read world literature the way it deserves to be read: slowly, suspiciously, and with a theory or two up my sleeve. Each author might get more than one post, because a single review has never been enough to say anything worth saying. Expect a close reading, a thematic argument, and usually a theoretical lens that the author never asked for but absolutely needed. Currently: Murakami, Camus, Elif Shafak, Patrick Hamilton.
Quotes from the Margins is where lines from writers who deserve far more readers than they have. The writers here are the ones your syllabus forgot, the ones whose sentences stay with you precisely because nobody prepared you for them.
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@gmail.com
