I'm Maryam Jan Akbari. I'm a writer, and before that I was a journalist in Kabul.
I was born in Iran to Afghan refugee parents, without papers. For the first thirteen years of my life I didn't appear in any registry anywhere — no birth certificate, no citizenship, no number. Because my family was undocumented, no school would take me. I learned to read under a different girl's name.
I spent six years reporting in Kabul, mostly about women. Then I published an investigation that made it impossible to stay, and in 2013 I came to Sweden and applied for asylum.
This channel is about what silence costs.
Not the silence someone forces on you until one day you don't know what you think, only what's safe to think.
I also talk about writing, about starting over in a language you don't have yet, and about the small things people do for each other that change everything.
My memoir The Woman Who Refused to Be Silenced came out in 2025. I'm writing the second one in Swedish.
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