Fighting the Taliban

Bashir is an award-winning poet and novelist. Since his first poetry collection was awarded first prize for New Poetry by the Afghan Writers’ Association in 1978, he has published seven books in Persian and English. His latest novel Maagir The Snake Charmer was entered for the Man Asian Literary Prize by the publisher and was long-listed for the 2013 Economist Crossword Book Award. Other works have been published in Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asia, Images of Afghanistan, Language for a New Century, English Pen, Asian Literary Review, Cha Literary Journal, East of the Web, and Litro. He is the winner of the 2015 Geneva Writers Group Literary Award for Fiction.