Journ
Zainab worked as a reporter, photographer and administrator for a cultural institute. She fled Afghanistan with her husband in October 2021, knowing that she had been identified as someone who took part in a wave of women’s protests against the Taliban takeover. The couple managed to get onto an evacuation flight that took them to a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, where they lived for a year before being resettled in British Columbia where they have been living since. Zainab’s story ‘The Hotel’ was published in Pen Transmissions in 2023. She is a contributor to My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird (MacLehose Press, 2021), Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023) and My Dear Kabul (Coronet 2024) and is working on a longer memoir about leaving Afghanistan.