Mandana Hendessi
Writer & Women's Rights Advocate
About Mandana
Mandana Hendessi (OBE) is a writer and women's rights advocate whose thirty years in gender equality and humanitarian work have taken her from the corridors of Westminster to the crowded refugee camps of the Middle East and the dimly lit cells of Afghan prisons. These encounters – layered with resilience, grief, and defiance – have given her a rare insight into the human cost of injustice, an insight that continues to infuse her fiction. Lived at the intersection of politics, war, and survival, these experiences shape her writing, which seeks to give voice to those too often silenced.
In Afghanistan, between 2008 and 2016, she listened to the voices of women displaced by family and communal violence and imprisoned for crimes both real and imagined, over endless glasses of tea in cells thick with tobacco smoke and the scent of bolani frying on makeshift stoves. The Almond Garden of Kabul (Afsana Press, 2025), her debut novel, is inspired by the women she met there.
Mandana is also the author of The Kurds: The Struggle for National Identity and Statehood (Agenda Publishing, 2024) and co-author of The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration: Beyond Western Research (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023). Her article on the criminalisation of Afghan women’s sexuality, written as a prelude to The Almond Garden of Kabul, appeared in Missing Perspectives in 2023.
She has also worked in Iraq and Syria for overseas aid programmes, most recently as Programme Manager for Norwegian People’s Aid in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In 2004, she was awarded an OBE for her role in supporting Iraqi women to secure a 25 per cent quota for parliamentary representation – a right later enshrined in Iraq’s 2005 constitution.
Iranian-born, Mandana has lived in the UK all her adult life. She now resides in London, where she continues to write fiction rooted in lived experience, exploring themes of war, displacement, and women’s resilience. She is currently working on her second novel, a political noir set between Syria and the Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring love, loss, and the haunting pull of unfinished vows.
Publications & Prizes
The Almdon Garden of Kabul (2025)
Awarded OBE (2004) for her role in supporting Iraqi women to secure a 25 per cent quota for parliamentary representation.