Saira Shah, on Extremists, Sufis & Afghanistan

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Saira Shah, on Afghanistan c. 1987. Excerpt from The Storyteller's Daughter audiobook.

Saira Shah was born in London and raised in Kent, England. She was educated at Bryanston School and read Arabic and Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, graduating in 1986. Her father was Idries Shah, an Afghan writer of books on Sufism. Part of his family was originally from Paghman, Afghanistan. Her mother is half-Parsee and half-English. The author Tahir Shah is her brother and she also has a sister, Tahir's twin, Safia Shah.

Her first trip to Afghanistan was when she was 21 years old. She worked for 3 years in Peshawar as a reporter covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She has also worked as a journalist for Channel 4 News, which she left in 2001. She married and divorced (after 5 years) a Swiss reporter, whom she met in Peshawar.

Shah worked with James Miller on several projects including the films Beneath the Veil (2001), Unholy War (2001), both Channel 4 Dispatches films for the UK documentary company Hardcash Productions, and Death in Gaza (2004), for their own TV company Frostbite Films. Miller was killed in 2003. In 2004, Shah won a Current Affairs BAFTA Award for Death in Gaza and in 2005 the film won three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Cinematography For Nonfiction Programming (Single Or Multi-Camera), Outstanding Directing For Nonfiction Programming and Exceptional Merit In Nonfiction Filmmaking (Shah sharing one award as a producer and being a nominee for another as a writer). Shah also appeared on the television programme Breakfast with Frost on 10 August 2003

Saira Shah received the first International Documentary Association (IDA) Courage Under Fire Award.

Shah currently lives between London and rural France with her partner, journalist and photographer Scott Goodfellow, and their daughter Ailsa. Their daughter, who is severely brain-damaged, was the inspiration for Shah's semi-autobiographical debut novel, The Mouse-Proof Kitchen (2013).
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