Project partners

Paranda is a programme of co-operation between KfW Stiftung and Untold to support and develop the craft of creative writers working in Dari and Pashto as well as to develop a unique network of local Afghan writers and those living in the diaspora. It is a three-year programme that began in 2023.

Three writers in Paranda are supported by the Bagri Creative Writing Award.

At a time of increased polarisation, it’s urgent that writers who are structurally marginalised – at risk, experiencing isolation, censorship, or prejudice – can publish and promote their writing. In 2025, Untold Narratives, with the British Library and the British Council, convened two round tables for international publishers, agents, translators and writers, to increase and ensure the viability, visibility and sensitivity for these writers, writing in their own languages and in translation.

The Bagri Foundation and Arts Council England lottery funding supported Untold’s team of writers, editors and translators to produce the book, My Dear Kabul (Coronet, 2024).

Since 2020, Untold has partnered with Weiter Schreiben, a literary platform based in Berlin, for authors from war and crisis zones. This collaboration offers writers from Untold’s Paranda project an opportunity to be commissioned and published in translation across Germany. The Untold-Weiter Schreiben partnership is supported by KfW Stiftung.

The British Council was a project partner for Write Afghanistan from 2019 to 2021. It also supported Paranda in 2023.

The Bagri Foundation joined us in 2020 to support a month-long online creative writing workshop and subsequently showcased these stories online. Bagri also supported the translation of Dari and Pashto texts for the children’s book, Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023).

Write Assamese is one of four literature projects that form the Language and Literature strand of the British Council’s UK-India Together season – a series of arts and culture collaborations to mark India’s 75th anniversary of independence.

Led by Lucy Hannah at Untold and Esha Chatterjee at Bee Books in Kolkata, this is a writer development programme for writers in Assamese, as well as translators working between Assamese and English which includes workshops and mentoring. The final stories are published in A Fistful of Moonlight: Stories from Assam from BEE Books in India and MacLehose Press in the UK.

Untold’s Director Lucy Hannah is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (KCL). To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March 2021, KCL invited writers participating in the Write Afghanistan project to share short messages in response to the International Women’s Day theme ‘Choose to Challenge’.

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