Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an educator, writer and poet from Leeds. Her work disrupts narratives about history, race, knowledge and power – interrogating the root purpose of conversations about Muslims, migrants, gender and violence in particular. Suhaiymah works to provide herself and others with the tools to resist systemic oppression by unlearning what society and the education system have instilled in us. She was the runner-up of the Roundhouse National poetry slam 2017 with her viral poem, This is Not a Humanising Poem which gained 2 million views and was short-listed for the Outspoken Prize for Poetry in 2018. Suhaiymah is the author of poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), co-author of the anthology, A FLY GIRL’S GUIDE TO UNIVERSITY: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019) and hosts the Breaking Binaries podcast.

Her latest book, Seeing for Ourselves: and Even Stranger Possibilities was published with Hajar Press in 2023. The cross-genre work explores pertinent questions about the limits of representation, inclusion and diversity in times of global violence and takes to the inner, and spirituality, for a way out. This comes on the back of her book, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia published with Pluto Press in 2022. This was a widely endorsed non-fiction analysis of Islamophobia described as ‘one of the most exciting voices of her generation’ by award-winning channel 4 journalist Fatima Manji.

Suhaiymah has written for The Guardian, Independent, Al-Jazeera, gal-dem and other national media outlets and her work has featured across radio and television, magazines and digital media. Her poetry, articles and books can be found on University and school syllabi. She has also been commissioned to write plays including: Brown Women Do It Too (Royal Court), A Coin in Somebody Else’s Pocket (Theatre Uncut), Whose Eyes Are These Anyway? (The Albany), My White Best Friend and other Letters Left Unsaid (The Bunker), and The End of Diaspora (Free Word Centre) and is during her Writer in Residence at the Leeds Playhouse in 2021-22 her play Take Care had a public reading in Furnace Festival. She is currently under commission to Kiln Theatre.