Project partners

The Paranda Network is a partnership between KfW Stiftung and Untold to support, develop and promote the work of Afghan women writers, working in their original languages and in translation.  

The Hawthornden Foundation is supporting a Project Co-ordinator for the Paranda Network, working across Dari, Pashto and English, for 2026-2027.  

At a time of increased polarisation, it’s urgent that writers who are structurally marginalised – at risk, experiencing isolation, censorship, or prejudice – can publish and promote their writing. In 2025, Untold Narratives, with the British Library and the British Council, convened a round table for international publishers, agents, translators and writers, to increase and ensure the viability, visibility and sensitivity for these writers, writing in their own languages and in translation. In 2026, this partnership produced a panel to continue the conversation, at the London Book Fair, 2026, with a particular focus on writers in Sudan and South Sudan.  

 The Bagri Foundation supported the establishment of the Paranda Network, 2020-2023, along with the British Council. 

In 2020, the Bagri Foundation supported a month-long online creative writing workshop and subsequently showcased these stories online. Bagri also supported the translation of Dari and Pashto texts for the children’s book, Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023).

In 2024, four writers in the Paranda Network were supported by the Bagri Creative Writing Award to create longer form, ambitious pieces for Aeon magazine.

The Bagri Foundation also supported Untold’s team of writers, editors and translators to produce the book, My Dear Kabul, A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Hodder/Coronet, 2024), along with Arts Council England – ACE.

Since 2020, Untold has partnered with Weiter Schreiben, a literary platform based in Berlin for authors from war and crisis zones. This collaboration offers writers from Untold’s Paranda project an opportunity to be commissioned and published in translation across Germany. The Untold-Weiter Schreiben partnership is supported by KfW Stiftung.

Write Assamese was one of four literature projects that formed the Language and Literature strand of the British Council’s UK-India Together season – a series of arts and culture collaborations to mark India’s 75th anniversary of independence.

Led by Lucy Hannah at Untold and Esha Chatterjee at Bee Books in Kolkata, this was a writer development programme for Assamese writers, and translators working between Assamese and English. The final stories are published in A Fistful of Moonlight: New Fiction from Assam (BEE Books, India, 2022/ MacLehose Press, UK, 2023).

Untold’s Director Lucy Hannah is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (KCL). To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March 2021, KCL published short messages from writers participating in Untold’s Write Afghanistan project in response to the theme, ‘Choose to Challenge’.