Dr Parwana Fayyaz is a scholar and teacher of Persian literature, specialising in long narrative poems (masnavi), and also a poet and translator based at the University of Cambridge.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Parwana was raised as a refugee in Pakistan. She studied at Stanford and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her doctorate in 2020. Shortly thereafter, she was elected to a four-year research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she currently lives, teaches, and writes.

Her first poetry collection, Forty Names, inspired by the Afghan-Persian storytelling tradition, was published by the Carcanet Press in 2021 and named a New Statesman Book of the Year and a White Review Book of the Year. It was later translated and published in Italian (Quaranta nomi) and Hebrew (ארבעים שמות). Parwana’s poems have been honoured with prizes from the Forward Arts Foundation and the World Poetry Academy. Her work as a translator is to promote the literature and culture of Afghanistan through the writings and voices of its female writers, such as in the books titled My Pen is the Wing of a Bird, published by MacLehose Press in 2022 and My Dear Kabul published by Coronet in 2024.