Writing (Selected)

Anāhitā Diamond’s first book, Breaking Silence: A Family Memoir of the Daughters of Iran, was acquired in a major international publishing deal and will be published by Canongate in the UK, Summit Books in the US and Simon & Schuster in Canada in 2027, with translation rights sold across twelve territories.

Her writing began on screen. In the early 2010s, at the age of 16, she wrote and directed the short films Ablaze (2011), screened at the Queer Film & Arts Fest, and Ashes (2012), recognised by the National Student Film Festival and BFI Future Film Festival. In 2014, she studied autobiographical screenwriting with filmmaker Allison Anders; in 2018, her short film Bittersweet, a social drama following the intersecting lives of three highly educated and employed, but unpaid, young women in Tehran, was written and directed as part of filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s workshop at the Iranian Artists Forum, where it was subsequently screened.

Her writing has since moved between film, journalism, criticism and literary non-fiction, with work undertaken in different capacities for publications and institutions including HuffPost, Cineaste, the Royal Opera House and the Harvard Kennedy School Review.

In 2019, Diamond was one of four non-fiction finalists in the inaugural Penguin Random House × #Merky Books New Writers’ Competition. She was subsequently selected for the London Library Emerging Writers Programme (2023–24), as one of 40 writers chosen from almost 1,400 applicants, and received the Spread the Word Early Career Bursary (2024–25). Her writing has also been supported by Stanford University, Berlin Writers’ Workshop, Tin House and Arvon, where she received support from the David Pease Fund.

In 2024, Diamond was awarded the prestigious Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, becoming the tenth woman — and the first woman from the MENA region — to receive the fellowship in its 55-year history. Since then, she has also been awarded the Write Club × The Groucho Club’s Writers Residency, receiving an honourary membership of the Club for 2026/2027.

Diamond helped develop the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’s Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme, first of its kind, working with Dr Kate Kennedy and Dr Eleri Anona Watson from its early stages. The programme now supports eight emerging life-writers internationally through mentorship, workshops and professional development. Diamond continues her involvement as a mentor.

She founded Penwoman in 2017, at the age of 23, originally under the name Artists for Development, as a non-profit literary and cultural collective. Following a brief hiatus, Penwoman returned with a programme of reading series, writing workshops and intimate literary retreats, held across the UK, continental Europe and Türkiye.