Nadia Ghulam Dastgir was born in Kabul (Afganistan) in 1985. Her life, like many other Afghan women, has been marked by the consequences of a cruel civil war, hunger and the Taliban regime. But these adversities couldn’t stop her and Nadia managed to move forward thanks to her ingenuity and courage, passing herself as a boy for ten years in order to feed her family.

 

It was her sociable character that brought her to collaborate with an N.G.O., through which she arrived in Catalonia, her new home. Now, finally, she can do everything that she always wanted to do: live in full freedom and continue studying and training to help her country and her own family.

When fully settled in our country, Nadia wanted to explain her story, and she did so with the collaboration of the journalist Agnès Rotger in the novel “The secret of my turban” (Edicions 62, 2010). The book won the prestigious prize Prudenci Bertrana, 2010 and achieved national critical acclaim.

Through the piece of documentary theatre, with her own name, Nadia, as the title and under the direction of Carles Fernández Giua, a wide public audience has seen very intimate and personal details of her difficult life in Kabul during the worst years of the war. This piece of theatre has achieved great success and continues to be performed in both our country and abroad.

It should be also mentioned, that Nadia published, together with Joan Soler i Amigó, the book, Tales That Healed Me (Columna, 2014), a beautiful compilation of stories that her mother told her in the hospital during her period of convalescence following the injuries she received from the bomb that changed her life.

Finally, this year, 2016, Nadia published, in conjunction with Javier Dieguez her second novel, The First Star of the Night (Plaza & Janés, 2016). It is a novel based on real life, recounting the daily lives of  Afghan women who are fighters, in a country that has suffered armed conflicts , one after another for more than 40 years.