Shukria Barakzai was born in 1970 in Kabul, Afghanistan to a middle class family. In the 1990s, she started studying at Kabul University but was forced to quit her studies halfway through her degree because of violence between the Mujahideen and the government. In 2002, when the Taliban regime fell six years after taking power, Shukria started Aina-E-Zan, a national weekly newspaper for women, which covered a range of topics, including maternal and infant mortality, child marriage, forced marriage, and violence against women. The next year, she was appointed as a member of the Ioya jirga, a body of representatives from across Afghanistan whose job it was to come together to pass the new constitution in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. She won her first elected position in 2005 when she was elected as a member of the Wolesi Jirga, or House of the People. At the time, she was one of 71 women out of 249 Members of Parliament. As a political, she continued her critique of the patriarchal nature of Afghan society and the government of Afghanistan. In 2015, she resigned from her position as MP when she was appointed Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Norway. As a result of her work and advocacy, she was the target in a suicide attack in 2014, which she survived but which killed 3 people and injured 17. In 2004 she was named at International Editor of the Year but World Press Review and the following year she was named Woman of the Year by BBC Radio 4’s program Woman’s Hour. In 2021, after the fall of Kabul, Shukria fled from Afghanistan.