The Taliban has tried, systematically and deliberately, to erase Afghan women from public life. What no decree has yet managed is to ban the act of writing.
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Coronet, 2024), with contributions from writers of the Paranda Network — managed and facilitated by Untold Narratives, a HAMRAH Network member — has reached number two on The Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list. It is a remarkable literary achievement. It is also a powerful act of resistance: Afghan women writing through repression, insisting on being heard.
My Dear Kabul is the result of years of sustained work with Afghan women writing in Dari and Pashto, translated by Parwana Fayyaz and Dr Negeen Kargar, and edited by Sunila Galappatti, Lucy Hannah, and Lillie Razvi Toon, whose work made these voices audible to a global audience.
What Paranda Network Does
Paranda Network, led by Untold Narratives, brings together Afghan women writers in Afghanistan and in exile; enhancing the craft of writers working in Dari and Pashto and sustaining a community that has continued to function despite the political upheaval of 2021, which scattered many of its members across the world.
It is a virtual space where Afghan women writers share skills, knowledge, and lived experience, working with international and Afghan literary editors and translators to develop short stories, non-fiction, and longer works for commission and publication — in translation internationally, and in their original languages wherever possible.
Every month, a literary editor, agent, publisher, or author joins writers to discuss their work. Speakers have included novelists Gillian Slovo, Leila Aboulela, Kate Mosse, and Ingrid Persaud; publisher Katharina Bielenberg; literary agent Elise Dillsworth; and editors Malu Halasa and Aunohita Mojumdar. The network also runs a monthly book club, selecting a work in Dari or Pashto for collective discussion, from Albert Camus to Elif Shafak to Afghan novelist Spozhmai Zaryab.
In September 2022, 19 Paranda writers were awarded Helen Wolff grants, established by descendants of Helen and Kurt Wolff to support politically persecuted women writers, the first group ever to receive them.
Other Publications by Paranda Network
Paranda Network’s writers have produced other major publications, each a milestone in Afghan women’s literary presence on the international stage.
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women was the first; a collection of short stories that introduced Paranda’s writers to international readers and demonstrated that Afghan women were producing work of genuine literary ambition and originality.
Rising After the Fall: Afghan Women Share Their Stories followed, non-fiction accounts from women navigating displacement, exile, and the particular grief of losing a country that had been slowly, but genuinely, changing.
Why This Matters
These writings are not only literature, but they also document what is happening to Afghan women and girls, told by Afghan women themselves, in the texture of daily life and in the particular detail that statistics and policy briefings cannot capture. Alongside the journalism of Zan Times and the work of the Afghanistan Women’s History Museum (both HAMRAH Network members), Paranda Network’s publications are part of the evidentiary and cultural infrastructure that Afghan civil society is building for the future.
The Taliban cannot ban what is already being read by thousands of people around the world.
HAMRAH Network congratulates every Paranda writer, and everyone who contributed to making this happen. We stand with every Afghan woman who refuses to put down her pen.
🔗 Find out more about Paranda Network: untold-narratives.org/paranda
🔗 Buy My Dear Kabul and Untold Narratives’ other publications: untold-narratives.org/publications
