H.N. Khan was born in Pakistan and immigrated to Canada at the age of seven. He grew up in the Regent Park neighbourhood of Toronto. He holds a business degree and decided to pursue entrepreneurship in software. Khan graduated from the Humber School for Writers correspondence program.
Fiction (Young adult)
Wrong Side of the Court
Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, 2022.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Fifteen-year-old Fawad Chaudhry loves two things: basketball and his mother’s potato and ground beef stuffed parathas. Both are round and both help him forget about things like his father, who died two years ago, his mother’s desire to arrange a marriage to his first cousin, Nusrat, back home in Pakistan, and the tiny apartment in Regent Park he shares with his mom and sister. Not to mention his estranged best friend Yousuf, who’s coping with the shooting death of his older brother.
But Fawad has plans: like, asking out Ashley, even though she lives on the other, wealthier side of the tracks, and saving his friend Arif from being beaten into a pulp for being the school flirt, and making the school basketball team and dreaming of being the world’s first Pakistani to be drafted into the NBA. All he has to do now is convince his mother to let him try out for the basketball team. And let him date girls from his school. Not to mention somehow get Omar, the neighborhood bully, to leave him alone . . .
Awards and Honours
2022 Toronto Book Award (Finalist)
2023 Best Juvenile or YA Crime Book (Crime Writers of Canada Awards)(Finalist)
2023 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award (Finalist)