Memoir of Afghanistan’s youngest female mayor goes to Virago

Zarifa Ghafari, Afghanistan’s youngest female mayor, will write her memoir for Virago.  

Editorial director Rose Tomaszewska bought world English rights from Kelly Falconer at Asia Literary Agency, in a joint deal with Clive Priddle and Anupama Roy-Chaudhury at PublicAffairs. The book will be written with Hannah Lucinda Smith, the Times Turkey correspondent and author of Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey (William Collins). It will be published in September 2022. 

Rights to the untitled memoir have sold in several territories worldwide, including in substantial pre-empts by Alfabet in The Netherlands, by OpenBooks in Hungary, and in auctions resulting in deals so far in Finland (Bazar), Denmark (Grønninge), France (Lattes) and in a nine-way auction in Germany won with a six-figure offer by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Interest has also come from Spain, Portugal, Italy, China and Japan.  

Ghafari became mayor of Maidan Shahr, a province of Kabul, Afghanistan, at the age of 24. Before that she had completed an MA in economics and launched and operated a women-focused radio station. During her tenure, violent threats were made to dissuade her from taking up her role, including six attempts on her life, and her father was murdered in retribution. After overseeing 70,000 families during the fall of Kabul, she escaped from the Taliban in August 2021 to seek refuge in Germany. 

She was included by the BBC as one of the 100 most inspiring and influential women in the world in 2019, and has received the International Woman of Courage Award from the US State Department in 2020, the Oxi Day Foundation Award for Courage in 2021 and many other awards since then. She is now setting up a foundation for women in Afghanistan and has written an open letter to the UN which is meeting on Thursday (9th December) to discuss whether to recognise Afghanistan under Taliban rule. 

Virago explained: “The memoir will describe Ghafari’s ground-breaking work to end corruption, promote peace and lift up women in her role as mayor of Maidan Shahr, Kabul; how she overcame violence, assassination attempts and the constant oppression of her sex, and endured the murder of her father in November 2020 – a killing meant to dissuade her from continuing in her role; and how she fled her homeland when the Taliban took control in August 2021. She will tell the stories of women still in Afghanistan under Taliban rule and share her vision for how grassroots activism can change their lives.” 

Ghafari said: “I am one of the lucky ones; I got out of Afghanistan alive when the Taliban retook the country. Millions of others did not – they are now living under one of the world's most repressive regimes, with any progress that was made for women over the past 20 years being brutally reversed. Every day I yearn for my motherland. Now it is my duty to make sure the world knows what is happening to women there, and what we must do to change things for them.” 

Smith, who won a Pulitzer grant to write for Wired magazine, commented: “The decline of women’s rights in recent years, not just in Afghanistan but around the world, is alarming. Zarifa’s story is a stark window on the dangers that women face under fanaticism, and it is a privilege to be telling it with her.” 

Tomaszewska described the book as “a major publication for Virago in autumn 2022”. She added: “Zarifa Ghafari’s story is one not of victimhood or even survival, but of work – the hard work she has done as mayor to lift up women and the activism she continues even in exile. Her courage, commitment and energy are astonishing, and I know that Hannah Lucinda Smith will capture her story with the grace and power it deserves.”