Qais Akbar Omar

Qais Akbar Omar (born 1982) is an Afghan-American writer. Omar is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, an autobiography of his childhood in Afghanistan during the years of the civil war and the Taliban from 1992–2001. To date, A Fort of Nine Towers has been published in over twenty languages.

Biography

Omar comes from a family of carpet traders. He is the owner of Kabul Carpets, a fourth-generation family business. Omar was born in 1982. When he was ten years old, the civil war broke out in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. At the age of twelve, Omar learned the art of carpet-weaving from a teacher whom he writes about in A Fort of Nine Towers, and during the years of the Taliban he ran a secret carpet factory in his home. Omar worked as an interpreter for the US military. He also worked for the UN, and served as a textiles specialist for USAID and the Asian Development Bank, helping carpet weavers across Afghanistan.

Education

Omar completed his bachelor's degree in journalism at Kabul University. In 2007, he was invited to the University of Colorado as a visiting scholar. In 2012, he moved to the US to study in the International Business School at Brandeis University. In 2014, he graduated from Boston University with a MFA in Creative Writing. In 2014–15, he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University.

Published works

In addition to his memoir A Fort of Nine Towers, Omar is the co-author, with writer Stephen Landrigan, of Shakespeare in Kabul. An expanded version of this book entitled A Night in the Emperor's Garden is slated for publication in September 2015. This book details the first performance of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost in Afghanistan, and how a group of actors and actresses came together to perform in 2005. It was the first time women had appeared onstage in thirty years. The performances were publicized in many countries. Omar has also written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Omar serves as a goodwill ambassador for Aschiana Foundation in Kabul and for the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women.