SaRB #08: The Afghan women writers who bore witness to the fall of Kabul

In the three years since its return to power, the Taliban have excluded women and girls from almost every aspect of public life in Afghanistan, denying them access to education, employment, even speaking or showing their faces outside their homes. Published this August, My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of An Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Coronet, August 2024) is the collective diary of 21 fiercely brilliant Afghan women writers, compiled using WhatsApp messages, offering courageous and intimate testimonies of the fall of Kabul in 2021 and its aftermath, of life under Taliban rule and far from home in exile. In August 2021 these women were in the process of publishing an anthology of short stories when their world was turned upside down. As they watched their cities fall, schools close, families and friends disperse and freedoms disappear, they stayed connected via WhatsApp messages, and established a space to keep their creativity alive, support each other and bear witness to the turmoil unfolding around them. My Dear Kabul is their story. My Dear Kabul is an Untold Narratives project, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by The Bagri Foundation. Untold is a development programme for writers marginalised by community or conflict. It has been working with women writers in Afghanistan since 2020, where support for writers has been hampered by restrictions on freedom of expression and instability. Marie, among the 21 contributors to My Dear Kabul, was born in Afghanistan but her family lived in exile when she was a young child, returning home during the years of the Islamic republic. She studied for her first degree at Kabul University’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences before completing a master’s degree in India. In August 2021, Marie was in Afghanistan, working in the marketing department of a German aid agency while running her own women-led counselling service. In November 2021, she was evacuated from her family home to an apartment in Germany; she moved alone. Her story ‘The Café’ was published in Moveable Type in 2023. Marie is also a contributor to My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird (MacLehose Press, 2021) and Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023). Parwana Fayyaz, a translator and editor of My Dear Kabul, is a scholar and teacher of Persian literature at the University of Cambridge. She is also a poet and translator working with multiple languages. Her poetry collection, Forty Names (Carcanet Press, 2021), was a New Statesman book of the year and a White Review book of the year. Her translations promote the writings and culture of Afghan people around the world. Sunila Galappatti, an editor of My Dear Kabul, has worked with other people’s stories as a dramaturg, theatre director, editor and writer: at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Live Theatre (Newcastle), Galle Literary Festival, Raking Leaves, Suriya Women’s Development Centre, Commonwealth Writers, Himal Southasian and Untold Narratives. She spent five years working with a long-term prisoner of war in the Sri Lankan conflict, to retell his story in A Long Watch (Hurst, 2016). I should add I’ve had the privilege of working with Sunila at Himal - so I’m thrilled to be speaking with her today.