Synopsis
In 2005, a group of actors in Kabul performed Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to the cheers of Afghan audiences and acclaim from foreign journalists. For the first time in years, men and women appeared on stage together. The future held no limits, the actors believed.
In this fast-moving and often humorous account, Qais Akbar Omar and Stephen Landrigan capture the hopes, struggles, and foibles of the actors as they extend their Afghan passion for poetry to Shakespeare's. Both authors were part of the production. Qais, a journalist, served as assistant director and interpreter for Parisian actress Corinne Jaber, who had come to Afghanistan on holiday and returned to direct the play. Stephen, himself a playwright, assembled a team of Afghan translators to fashion a script in Dari as poetic as Shakespeare's. This chronicle of optimism plays out against the heartbreak of knowing that Afghanistan did not turn out the way the actors had hoped.
During the Taliban era, Qais Akbar Omar ran a carpet factory in his home, providing secret employment for forty young women. He is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story.
About the Author
Qais Akbar Omar is a writer whose work explores the human experience of modern Afghanistan. He is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story, a memoir translated into more than twenty languages. The book was selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review, named a Washington Post Notable Book, and recognized as one of the Best Books of the Year by The Seattle Times and Kirkus Reviews. It was also a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
Omar is also the co-author of A Night in the Emperor's Garden, which was shortlisted for the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography and adapted for BBC Radio 3. His essays, short stories, and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Sunday Times, The Globe and Mail, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, The Markaz Review, Guernica, and other publications.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Omar earned a BA in Journalism from Kabul University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University. Before and alongside his literary career, he worked with USAID and the Asian Development Bank, supporting Afghanistan's carpet industry and artisan communities.
<br> <br>Stephen Landrigan is a former journalist for the Washington Post and BBC Radio. He lives in Massachusetts, where he tends a small orchard near Boston. His play Pan Beaters won first prize in London Weekend Television's Play on Stage Awards in 1989, and his dramatization of V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street has been staged in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin
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