Feryal Ali-Gauhar
Feryal Ali-Gauhar is an actor, film-maker, columnist, novelist, and animal rights activist. She has served as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund. Currently, she is an Advisor at the Water and Power Development Authority of Pakistan for cultural heritage management of Diamer Bhasha Dam. Her first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was a bestseller in India, and her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, won the Patras Bokhari award and was translated into several European languages. An Abundance of Wild Roses is her third novel, written with the assistance of the Roger Deakin award for environmental activism.
Another influence came much later from the I spent working in Gilgit-Baltistan. The whole region, which stems from the Caucuses, used to practice what is known, generically, as the religions of the mountains. I started reading origin stories of those beliefs. It was uncanny – and also not – to find that others, too, had imagined what I had when I was younger.