Today marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Rahnaward Zaryab, one of the Afghanistan’s most prominent writers and short-story authors.
Zaryab was born on Aug. 25, 1944, in Kabul’s Rikakhana neighbourhood. He completed his early education at Habibia High School before studying journalism at Kabul University.
Between 1972 and 1982, he worked as an editor and editor-in-chief of several Afghan magazines and publications. In 1974, he married Spozhmai Zaryab, a leading Afghan fiction writer.
Zaryab was imprisoned for a period in 1979 at Pul-e-Charkhi prison and later served as head of the Afghan Writers’ Union for five years starting in 1984.
He left Afghanistan for France in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, resuming his literary and cultural work.
His first short story was published in Kabul in 1963, when he was 19. Over his career, he published numerous short story collections, essays and novels, including Golnar and Aina, Char Gerd-e Qala Gashtam, The Uprising of Humans and Animals, Kaka Sheshpar and the Daughter of the Fairy King, The Fifth Dervish and The Coin Found by Solomon.
Zaryab died on Dec. 11, 2020, at a Kabul hospital after contracting COVID-19.
