A T M Haidar Khan

Born in Bangladesh, where he spent his early life, A T M Haidar Khan moved to the United Kingdom after completing the 12th grade — a transition that would come to define much of his outlook, split as it has been ever since between the country of his birth and the countries that shaped his adult life. He later continued his studies in the United States, eventually settling in New York, where he now lives and works. That geography is not incidental to his writing; it runs underneath nearly everything he has published.

He is a research-based writer, public servant, and humanitarian advocate whose work moves fluidly between his work as a columnist — including 2017 labour-rights reporting later cited in peer-reviewed academic research on Bangladesh’s garment industry — international student leadership, civic service, and literary nonfiction. Across all of it, he brings a genuinely cross-cultural lens to the subjects he returns to again and again: caregiving, human vulnerability, resilience, dignity, and the quiet endurance of families facing crisis.

That perspective was shaped early, and it was shaped by service rather than by observation alone. From October 2012 to October 2014, Khan served as the elected President and a board director of the Bangladeshi Students Union UK, representing an international student community of approximately 9,000 — a role that placed him, while still a student himself, in the position of advocating for the practical and cultural needs of thousands of others navigating life far from home. It was an early apprenticeship in public leadership, and one that has carried through the rest of his career in a fairly direct line.

He now serves as a civil servant with the City of New York, work that continues the same instinct toward public accountability in a different register. Alongside it, he is the founder of the Niyan Foundation, a humanitarian initiative supporting communities across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, for which he publishes a biannual newsletter documenting its ongoing work — a project that keeps him tied, in a concrete and continuing way, to the region and the communities he came from.

Khan is the author of The Silence Between Two Heartbeats, a literary memoir and work of narrative nonfiction published through Barnes & Noble Press. The book moves between realist memoir and an extended allegorical fairy tale to explore fatherhood, a newborn child’s medical crisis, caregiving, uncertainty, separation, resilience, memory, and hope. It is, in many ways, the place where the separate strands of his life converge: the journalist’s instinct for precise, researched detail; the advocate’s insistence on dignity for people going through what is hardest to speak about; and the cross-cultural fluency of someone who has had to rebuild a sense of home more than once. The themes the book takes up — endurance, uncertainty, the particular loneliness of caregiving — echo, and are echoed by, the humanitarian and civic threads of the rest of his life.

As a columnist, public servant, humanitarian, and literary nonfiction writer, the throughline stays remarkably constant across four otherwise very different vocations: a close, unflinching attention to how people endure what they did not choose, and a consistent instinct to put that endurance into words, into policy, or into direct service — whichever the moment calls for.