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Qais Akbar Omar
Edit ProfileEducation
Omar completed his bachelor"s degree in journalism at Kabul University. In 2007, he was invited to the University of Colorado as a visiting scholar. In 2012, he moved to the United States to study in the International Business School at Brandeis University.
In 2014, he graduated from Boston University with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
In 2014-2015, he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University.
Career
Omar is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, an autobiography of his childhood in Afghanistan during the years of the civil war and the Taliban from 1992–2001. To date, A Fort of Nine Towers has been published in over twenty languages. Omar comes from a family of carpet traders.
He is the owner of Kabul Carpets, a fourth-generation family business.
When he was ten years old, the civil war broke out in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. Omar worked as an interpreter for the United States military.
He also worked for the United Nations, and served as a textiles specialist for United States Agency for International Development and the Asian Development Bank, helping carpet weavers across Afghanistan.
