Naushaba Burney

Naushaba Burney was a journalist, social activist, and editor from Pakistan. She was the country's first female journalist. She was born in Nagpur, British India (now India) in November 1932. She had six siblings, including Ameena Saiyid, the Managing Director of Oxford University Press, Karachi. At Partition, she migrated to Pakistan with her family. She was married to the journalist, Iqbal Hassan Burney, editor of Outlook Magazine, with whom she had one son and two daughters. She completed her master's degree in Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1950s. She also taught journalism at the University of Karachi. Burney worked in a number of organisations including Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), Dawn newspaper and Aga Khan University, Karachi. She headed Humsafar, an inflight magazine of the PIA and then worked at Dawn for a few years in the 1990s. At Dawn, she headed the Sunday Magazine, Tuesday Review, and also headed the health pages. She received an MBE (Order of the British Empire) for her work in social services on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. She was awarded Takeo Iwahashi Award at Gothenburg, Sweden for her work with self-help organizations for the blind. The Pakistani government awarded her a Tamgha-i-Imtiaz. She died of natural causes at her home in Karachi on February 11, 2016, and was buried in the Defence graveyard in Karachi.