Written by Nooria Aryan, translated by Qais Akbar Omar
Nooria Aryan is a doctor specialising in gynaecology. She was working in a hospital in Kabul when the Taliban arrived in August 2021. Since then, she has fled to Germany where she hopes to practice medicine again. She is a contributing writer to My Dear Kabul (Coronet/Hodder, 2024).
Qais Akbar Omar holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–15. Qais is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatised by BBC Radio. He has published short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, The Markaz Review, Guernica, Arrowsmith, Literary Hub, American Chordata, and elsewhere.
This story was produced as part of Paranda, a writer development programme and global network for women writers in Afghanistan and the diaspora, facilitated by Untold Narratives, a development programme for writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict, and supported by KfW Stiftung.
