Parwana Fayyaz

Parwana Fayyaz (b 1990, Afghanistan) is an academic, poet and translator.

She is currently a junior research fellow at Cambridge University, where she earned her PHD in Persian studies, after gaining her MA in religious studies and BA in comparative literature with a minor in Creative Writing from Stanford University in the USA.

Her poem Forty Names won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2019, and is the first poem and title of her debut collection of poetry, published in 2021 to a warm reception – her collection was both a New Statesman and a White Review Book of the Year in 2021.

She has worked closely with the Untold Narrative, a development programme for writers who live in places where they are marginalised either by society or by conflict.