Project partners

Paranda is a programme of co-operation between KfW Stiftung and Untold to support and develop the craft of creative writers working in Dari and Pashto as well as to develop a unique network of local Afghan writers and those living in the diaspora.

Four writers in Paranda are supported by the Bagri Creative Writing Award.

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.

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.

The British Council was a project partner for Write Afghanistan from 2019 to 2021. It also supported Paranda in 2023.

The Bagri Foundation joined us in 2020 to support 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) and My Dear Kabul (Coronet, 2024). 

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 by BEE Books in India and MacLehose Press in the UK in 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’.