Farah Ahamed

Farah Ahamed has made the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Mother Earth. Ahamed described Mother Earth as “dust, dirt, nurturing, mother earth.” The longlist was selected from nearly 1,900 submissions.

A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the longlist. “A geographically broad and still intimate story about connection to earth. The link with her own mother and the land was well done,” the readers said about Mother Earth.

In her short story, The Woman Destroyed, (1967) Simone de Beauvoir’s protagonist Monique utters the words, “I am no longer anything.” She says this when she feels redundant as a wife and mother; she feels she is not worth anything because the roles she fulfilled are no longer necessary to her husband and son. Through Monique, Beauvoir suggests that when a woman’s existence is defined by recognition from “others”—the consequences of withdrawal of it or failure to receive it—are an existential crisis. A woman undergoes a sense of loss. that of her ‘being’…

Artistic expression, language and shared rituals around menstruation have the potential to foster ‘harambee’, the Kenyan concept of solidarity.

At the height of the Iranian women’s revolution in September 2022, sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini, Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan wrote Zen, Zindagi, Azadi – Women, Life, Freedom on the walls and railings outside the Berlin Embassy using a mixture of henna, hair and menstrual blood. She was arrested by the authorities and imprisoned…

I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words coup d’etat.

That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots. The telephone lines were dead. There was no power. My mother did not know what was happening and we had no way of contacting anyone…

A new novel explores the hidden currents of power, loyalty, and class divides that aim to keep women’s experiences invisible.

In the 1940s, when charged with obscenity, Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto famously declared, “If you think my writing is dirty, it is because society is dirty.” This potent statement can be interpreted as art’s profound ability to reflect and expose the uncomfortable realities of its time, including the often-concealed “dirt” within patriarchal structures that marginalize women…

Several books are mentioned in Mohammed Hanif’s novel Rebel English Academy, most notably Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). In one scene, Sabiha Bano, a young woman on the run determined to find her incarcerated parents, throws Fanon’s book at the failed revolutionary and English teacher, Sir Baghi. This moment invites the question of whether her gesture carries a deeper symbolic significance.