Blogs in September 2024

Maxym 17th September 2024

He looks like an angel but kills like a devil. In war-ravaged Chechnya in 2000, six-year-old Maxym’s life is shattered when his parents are brutally murdered by Islamic militants and his sister is subjected to a horrific assault. Orphaned,...

Read More 

The Afghans 10th July 2024

In her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad studied life in Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. Now twenty years later, the Taliban is back in power, and Seierstad...

Read More 

The Cruel Way 7th April 2024

In 1939, adventurer and writer Ella Maillart set off on an epic drive from Geneva to Kabul, accompanied by journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who later became an antifascist and lesbian icon. The two women travelled partly to escape...

Read More 

A Thousand Golden Cities 24th November 2023

In the Western mind, Afghanistan has come to mean many things in recent decades, most of them bad. Partly thanks to the relentless media coverage of the “War on Terror”, it has become synonymous above all with war and...

Read More 

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water 1st September 2023

In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one...

Read More