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Parwana Fayyaz

Author Photo of Parwana Fayyaz, credit Luca Zenobi
Books by this author: Forty Names
  • About
  • Reviews
  • Parwana Fayyaz was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1990. From the age of seven to sixteen, she was raised in Quetta, Pakistan. After finishing high school in Kabul, she enrolled in an English language immersion program and subsequently began her undergraduate studies in Chittagong, Bangladesh. She transferred to Stanford University and earned both her B.A. in 2015, with a major in Comparative Literature (with Honors) and a minor in Creative Writing (Poetry). She moved to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD in Persian Studies at Trinity College in September of 2016 and took up Junior Research Fellowship as the Carmen Blacker Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University in October 2020.

    Author photo credit: Luca Zenobi
    Praise for Parwana Fayyaz  'My book of the year is a debut, a slim collection of poetry called Forty Names (Carcanet) by the young Afghani poet Parwana Fayyaz. 'No one ever wanted to know/what the real story was.' As clear as unruined water, as courageous as a poet can be in these times, as haunting as the 'brutal history' it records and as marvellously summoned as the lives it celebrates, it's a calm reclamation and a tour de force.'

    Ali Smith, New Statesman Books of the Year 2021

    'Independent and timely, a lyrical act of witness'

    Martina Evans, The Irish Times

    'Fayyaz skillfully interweaves words from Dari into English-language poems, at once defamiliarizing the known and revealing an intimacy in what seems to be foreign.'

    Rebecca Ruth Gould, Poetry Foundation

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