Voices of Women from Afghanistan: Five Plays and the Stories that Inspired Them

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Description

Five female playwrights offer short but intense experiences of the lives of Afghan girls and women in the brief, perilous years before the Taliban retook Kabul.

When Huffington Post began to publish Afghan women journalists writing in English (through a programme called Sahar Speaks), producer Lesley Ferris saw the potential for turning their reports unique glimpses of Afghan womens stories and the creativity and resilience of Afghan women storytellers -- into pieces of drama. This groundbreaking book is the result of that vision.

The five plays, and the journalism theyre based on are illuminating, wry, surprising, heart-rending. They open our eyes to what Afghan women wrestled with in the two decades between periods of Taliban rule, and remind us what is being lost every day that women in Afghanistan are silenced.

In her introduction, Ferris situates the plays in the challenging context of twentieth-century theatre in Afghanistan, and laces her text with examples of Afghan womens landays: short, often sarcastic poems composed on the fly in womens gatherings, and unknown in the West.

Author Bio

Lesley Ferris is an adventurous theatre practitioner with a lifelong engagement on issues of gender.

Jenny Morgan is a freelance editor.