A01=Durkhanai Ayubi
Adelaide
Afghan food
Afghanistan
agriculture
Art of Eating Prize
Author_Durkhanai Ayubi
award- winning
Behrouz Boochani
belonging
Category=DNC
Category=JBCC4
Category=WBN
Category=WZ
culinary
cultural identity
diaspora
displacement
Edward Said
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_food-drink
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminism
food writing
history
home
hospitality
identity
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Memoir
migration
orientalism
Parwana
polemic
politics
racism
refugee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Taliban
transformative story
USSR
Vavilov
war
Product details
- ISBN 9781761500121
- Weight: 321g
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Murdoch Books
- Publication City/Country: AU
- Product Form: Paperback
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To truly understand things, we need to know them. We need to taste them.
This is a story of how food connects us all - not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance. Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future.
She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us - with timeless prescience - how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom.
This is a story of how food connects us all - not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance. Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future.
She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us - with timeless prescience - how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom.
Durkhanai Ayubi is an Afghan-born writer whose body of work seeks to reclaim the stories of her motherland, explore the experience of displacement, and interrogate the limitations embedded within normalised notions of justice and power. Her book Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen received global acclaim, winning international awards including from the Food Writers Guild and the Art of Eating.
She has been featured in national and global media, spanning TV, print, podcasts and radio, including in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and beyond. She has worked extensively in the arts, including contributing to the curation of national literary festivals. She is a Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Institute, a social justice-focused organisation based at Oxford University. Here, her work takes on global dimensions, with her research creating frameworks for transformative justice with narrative reclamation at its heart.
Her next book, She Who Tastes, Knows, is forthcoming. It asks, through a lens of food and peering into the unseen, what more is possible when stories and histories are returned to a people.
She has been featured in national and global media, spanning TV, print, podcasts and radio, including in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and beyond. She has worked extensively in the arts, including contributing to the curation of national literary festivals. She is a Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Institute, a social justice-focused organisation based at Oxford University. Here, her work takes on global dimensions, with her research creating frameworks for transformative justice with narrative reclamation at its heart.
Her next book, She Who Tastes, Knows, is forthcoming. It asks, through a lens of food and peering into the unseen, what more is possible when stories and histories are returned to a people.
