I'm a freelance journalist, researcher, and author, and I write about culture, urban life, human rights, religion, and food. My work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Marie Claire, Roads and Kingdoms, and on the BBC. I've reported features from Jordan, Lebanon,  the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. I speak English, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Dutch, and Punjabi. I've worked as a  full-time reporter — and as a stringer, fixer, translator, TV show host, radio jockey, scriptwriter. I am currently based in The Netherlands.

I’m the co-author of Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal (Roli Books, 2024). In 2021-2022, I co-hosted and co-produced the Notes on a Scandal podcast with Tooba Masood-Khan, about the life and death of the late poet Mustafa Zaidi.

In 2014, I published my first novel Karachi, You're Killing Me! (Penguin Random House India), which was adapted into an Indian feature film called Noor in 2017.

I was a recipient of the IWMF’s Kim Wall Memorial Fund for 2019. In 2017, I received an International Reporting Project fellowship to report on gender and LGBTI rights. I studied Arabic at Middlebury Language School’s Intensive Summer Program in 2016 as a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace. I was a Visiting Carnegie Fellow at New America’s National Security Program in 2014.

You can reach me at saba@mm.st.

Represented by The Wylie Agency