Afghanistan’s universities are undergoing a major shift. Recent directives from the Taliban-led Ministry of Higher Education have instructed faculty to remove books authored by Afghan women from curricula and discontinue courses such as human rights and women’s sociology..
While these measures reshape academic life inside Afghanistan, women’s literary contributions continue to circulate globally. Over the past several decades, Afghan women have published works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and legal scholarship that provide insight into the country’s social, cultural, and political landscape. Many were written in exile, others were created within Afghanistan itself, often under difficult circumstances.
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group
This book began as a WhatsApp group chat among 21 Afghan women writers in 2021, during the days following the Taliban’s return to power. Fearing searches and surveillance, participants deleted their messages from their phones after sharing, while volunteers abroad preserved them. Over the course of a year, these fragments formed a 70,000-word collective diary, an intimate record of everyday life under sudden restrictions. The voices range from young teachers to grandmothers, each capturing the mix of fear, humour, and resilience in Kabul’s streets and homes. It is as much testimony as literature, bearing witness to an historic turning point.
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird
Published in 2022, My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird is an anthology of short fiction by Afghan women. The book brings together 18 writers working in both Dari and Pashto, developed through the Untold “Write Afghanistan” project over two years. The stories span everyday themes such as childhood, family life, friendship, as well as more charged experiences of war, identity, and social change. Together, they reveal a vibrant literary culture that persists even amid conflict.
Fevziye Rahgozar Barlas — Wonderland and The Heavens Are My Father
Fevziye Rahgozar Barlas, born in Balkh in 1955, is a poet and short story writer who left Afghanistan in 1979 and built much of her career in exile. She later worked as a journalist and editor for Radio Free Europe. Her published works include Dayer-e Shegeftiha (Wonderland), The Heavens Are My Father, and Wondering Eyes. Across genres, her writing blends lyrical imagery with reflections on displacement, exile, and the persistence of cultural memory. Barlas’s work demonstrates how Afghan women have continued to create literature even when removed from their homeland, showing the adaptability of Afghan identity across geographies.
The Storyteller’s Daughter by Saira Shah
The memoir of a young woman shaped by two dramatically disparate worlds. Saira Shah is the English-born daughter of an Afghan aristocrat, becomes, at twenty-one, a correspondent at the front of the war between the Soviets and the Afghan resistance. Then, imprisoning herself in aburqa, she risks her life to film Beneath the Veil, her acclaimed record of the devastation of women’s lives by the Taliban. Discovering her extended family, discovering a world of intense family ritual, of community, of male primacy, of arranged marriages, and finding at last the now war-ravaged family seat, she discovers as well what she wants and what she rejects of her extraordinary heritage.
Dancing in the Mosque; An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her SonBY Ḥumayrā Qadiri
“In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story–and that of Afghan women–Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity”
The Secret Sky; a Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan by Atia Abawi
Two teens from different ethnic groups in present-day Afghanistan must fight their culture, tradition, families, and the Taliban to stay together as they and another village boy relate the story of their forbidden love.
The Favored Daughter : One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan Into the Future by Fawazia Koofi
The nineteenth daughter of a local village leader in rural Afghanistan, the author was left to die in the sun after birth by her mother. But she survived, and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship has defined her life ever since. Despite the abuse of her family, the exploitative Russian and Taliban regimes, the murders of her father, brother, and husband, and numerous attempts on her life, she rose above her fate to becoming the first Afghani woman Parliament speaker. Here, she shares her amazing story, punctuated by a series of poignant letters she wrote to her two daughters before each political trip, letters describing the future and freedoms she dreamed of for them and for all the women of Afghanistan. Today, she is one of the most outspoken critics of human rights violations against Afghani women and children and uses her influence to bring global attention to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, even as a frustrated American military considers relinquishing it to the Taliban.
