Our story
In 2019, Lucy Hannah, founder of Untold Narratives, was working with script writers in Afghanistan. The women writers explained how they also wrote prose fiction, but as women, they had few routes to publication and no way of coming together with other aspiring authors. If you are a writer, you need to be able to share your work, and for women writers in Afghanistan, isolation, instability, and prejudice meant this was near impossible. Two of the script writers agreed to work with Lucy, to change this.
Five years later, these two women are part of a community of 55 aspiring Afghan women writers who work with Untold, and whose stories have been published in international literary magazines, major news outlets, and in four books which have sold more than 20,000 copies across the world.
Untold has collaborated with these writers, connecting them with editors and literary translators to develop their work. It has created a trusting and committed community in which they can share their stories with each other and connect with the wider literary world. And Untold has grown audiences for their work – translated and published in seven languages – and celebrated at events across Europe and Asia.
All this has happened despite a global pandemic and the fall of Kabul in 2021. With the worsening situation for women in Afghanistan, our work with this community must continue. And with the proliferation of war, autocracy and censorship across the world, it is only becoming more urgent.
In 2022, Untold was invited to replicate its editorial model with writers living without any creative infrastructure through which to develop their writing, in Assam, NE India. Here, writers are marginalised primarily by language.
Untold worked with a local partner, BEE Books in Kolkata to publish an anthology of new writing translated from Assamese, in three editions – local, national and international.
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