Sarah Khan-compressed

Sarah Khan ™03 in Hyderabad, India.

Photo: Nishat Fatima

CHARACTER SKETCH

Sarah Khan ™03

Grounded by the pandemic, the globetrotting travel writer is finding creative outlets.

The New York“based travel writer Sarah Khan ™03 has filed dispatches from six continents for the New York TimesÌýalone. Indeed, she likens herself to the globetrotting video-game heroine Carmen Sandiego, hence her social media hashtag #whereintheworldissarahkhan. Grounded by the pandemic, however, Khan has been poring over old notebooks from her seven years as a freelance journalist (previously, she was an editor at Travel + LeisureÌýand GothamÌýmagazines). They are a means of exploration in a stagnant time, of course, but she also using them to pitch stories with fresh takes on previous trips. œBy cataloging my past experiences, I™m looking at them in different ways,� Khan said. œThat what I can offer.�ÌýÌý”Jacqueline Tempera

CHILDHOOD DREAM
I™ve been telling people I wanted to be a journalist since I was 8 years old. It was nonnegotiable. My father worked for an airline when I was younger and traveling was always a part of my life and my upbringing. Blending the two made a lot of sense.Ìý

LEAP OF FAITH
After working in magazines and falling in love with travel writing, I moved to South Africa and gave myself a year to make freelance writing work financially. I leveraged the fact that I was living in Cape Town and broke onto a lot of different editors™ radars. I know not everyone has the luxury or ability to move overseas, especially these days, but if you ever have the opportunity”do it.

SENSE OF PLACE
You can™t try to tell the entire story of a place as an outsider helicoptering in. What good travel writing is meant to do, and what I aspire to do, is use my perspective and my life experiences to tell a side of a story of that place.Ìý

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