Shazia Altaf has been our 2025 Middlesbrough Writer In Residence. Shazia is a writer from the North of England. She has worked in libraries, government, call centres, as a shop merchandiser, as well as other things. She won the 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award Platinum Prize in fiction. She is currently editing her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the inaugural Primadonna Novel Prize in 2021, and her work was also listed for the 2021 Exeter Short Story Prize for ‘Lepidoptera’. Her short story ‘Selling Oil’ was published in the Bricklane New Writers Anthology 2022.
Shazia’s residency took place in Middlesbrough in collaboration with Middlesbrough Central Library and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Creative’s Future’s Writer in Residence opportunity came at just the right time, and I was thrilled to be appointed. The residency included writing days where I was free to scrawl words, listen, people watch (a favourite writer pastime), and be inspired by MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), eyeing the collections, provoking thoughts. I sat down to work on my novel, Unruly Bodies, based on a woman of colour in World War II. Even in the cold Baltic spirit of those February days, the sun streamed through the expansive glass walls across my writing pages, invigorating them and me alike.
The wonderful thing about this residency was that it wasn’t wedded to a single place; it was divided between MIMA, workshops at library hubs, and in non-traditional spaces with Borderlands, a local culture organisation serving underserved community groups. I’m naturally at home in libraries; Middlesbrough Central Library was a haunt of mine as a child—huddled in a nook, eyeballing a book—so it was a funny kind of moment to be there so many years later, with that awkward kid now teaching a writing workshop as a writer in residence (yet, I still do not feel quite grown up!).
In the workshops I focused on something called ‘Word Magic’: considering where our inspirations, muses, and visions come from in our stories, how parts of the brain connect through invisible strings to the fingers. Discussing Klimt’s art—the questionable kiss—is it universal love, or a creepy man clinging on to a half-dead woman? We will never know, and that’s the beauty of it. Playing a recording of Hans Zimmer’s organ-busting space exploration, cornfield-chase soundtrack to Interstellar for free form writing. With the explicit aim of banishing boredom and challenging ideas about writing workshops and what they can be.
‘Creativity is intelligence having fun.’
-Albert Einstein
In the workshops I used music, Max Richter’s Four Seasons, and art like Banksy’s Balloon Girl, mired in modern building dirt—audio and visual stimulus to explore the ways we see, how our senses react, what thoughts, images, and words are conjured within us against these pieces. The workshops were about trying to create a relaxing space, a fun way to write without pressure: it’s not about having to show your work, writing on demand, it is about having some real space to be free, inspired to think, and be, however someone wishes to.
At MIMA, I did my writing days and a drop-in session where I chatted to vibrant local people about writing and did some quick, live, fun writing activities out in the open. With Middlesbrough being one of the most economically disadvantaged areas in the country, getting to do this work here was especially worthy. Seeing genuine thrill and glee in the participants faces in the Borderland workshops was its own reward.
Banksy’s Girl with a Balloon: ‘There is always hope.’
During my writing days, I got to scribble away on my current project, Unruly Bodies, where I could go and live in Paris in the hot burning summer of 1943 in my mind, weaving threads… It is so vital as a writer to have space away, in places away from your own real life, to have time to write. Where I could follow the protagonist’s spiralling steps that she took in that fateful summer sending messages back to England, uncovering the intrigue that made her spy network fall in a critical point in world history. We are not used to seeing women of colour in these roles. Opening the historical records, wiping off the cobwebs and letting out these characters, bringing the dead back to life into my present is thrilling, words just words from the dreaming…
