Nadia Ghulam

Nadia Ghulam (born 4 June 1985 in Kabul) is an Afghan who spent ten years posing as her dead brother to evade the Taliban's strictures against women. Her book about her experiences, written with Agnès Rotger and published in 2010, El secret del meu turbant (The Secret of My Turban) won the Prudenci Bertrana Prize for fiction. She now lives in Catalonia and in 2014 published contes que em van curar, written with Joan Soler.

In 1993, Ghulam's family's house was destroyed by a bomb. She spent six months in hospital in a coma and has been operated on 14 times. Her face is permanently disfigured. After the Taliban took control, she decided at the age of 11 to disguise herself as a man, adopting the identity of her dead brother Zelmai, in order to be able to leave the house alone and work to support her mother and surviving younger sisters.