Born in Kabul in the mid-eighties, she soon fled the warring ruptures of Soviet occupied Afghanistan with her family, eventually arriving as refugees on Kaurna land in Adelaide, Australia where she was raised.
This early lived experience of sudden loss and starting anew, while straddling the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures positioned in dominant narratives as irreconcilable opposites, awoke within her a sensitivity to a resounding asymmetry in global norms. While the ideas, knowledges and lives of some are seen and valued, those of many others are discarded, distorted and erased – giving rise to devastating real life consequences.
Soon, she came to understand with increasing intensity, that without the ability to take back her own stories, to tell them through the felt multi-dimensionality of her own body and the intergenerational memory and wisdom it holds – there is no foundational depth or breadth from which to make realities that allow for flourishing.
Her writing and speaking, her work in community spaces and in the arts – all of it is a devotion to contributing to a multiplicity that sees and walks through the intentional impoverishments and exclusions being normalised for us all. It is to remember and elicit instead, the aroma of a deeper abundance that, though rendered latent, still exists within us.
Ayubi’s first book Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen (2020) received global acclaim. It won the prestigious Art of Eating Prize, a Guild of Food Writers Award, and was shortlisted for the Fortnum Mason award, and in the New York Times’ Best Books of 2020. This was followed by She Who Tastes, Knows: a memoir of food, exile and awakening (2026), which, through a lens of her ancestral food and its propensity to reconciliation and life, offers her reframed understanding of themes spanning knowledge norms, feminism, refugee lives and modernity.
Alongside her literary path, she is involved in her family’s celebrated restaurant Parwana, and ran the offshoot Kutchi Deli Parwana, which preserve and share a culinary tradition subjected to multiple ruptures. Through tasting a cuisine born of landscapes brimming with seed diversity and cultural exchange, diners are invited into an Afghanistan that exists from within – teeming with an ancient ethos of hospitality,
copiousness and warmth.
Beyond being a voice in contemporary food writing and landscapes, her work extends into contributions to understandings of social equity, Australian and global cultural memory, and migration.
Through her books, public speaking and community participation, she leads with an embodiment of the fullness of her own ancestral story, so she may contribute with as much possible wholeness to broader conversations around identity, belonging and expanding possibility.
Author of Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen (2020), an internationally acclaimed cookbook combining Afghan family recipes with memoir and cultural history.
Author of She Who Tastes, Knows: A Memoir of Food, Exile and Awakening (2026), a literary memoir exploring identity, exile, spirituality and belonging.
Recognised for redefining food writing by combining recipes with personal narrative, history and philosophy.
Organises fundraising events that directly support people in Afghanistan through times of crises, in partnership with NGOs including Afghan Australian Development Organisation, Human Appeal and Mahboba’s Promise.
Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Fellowship, based in Oxford University, established to contribute to the eradication of systemic injustice.
Seed Steward for South Australia’s annual Nature Festival.
Ambassador for the OzAsia Festival.
Developed and led workshops on Narratives of Transformation.
Featured as a narrator at the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Contributes essays and commentary in national and international news outlets, journals and magazines.
Features in national and global media spanning podcasts, television, radio and print.
Developed and led writing workshops.
Regular speaker at literary festivals, corporate and community organisations, universities, schools, cultural institutions including galleries and museums on issues spanning social equity, inclusion, diversity.
Part of her family’s food and restaurant journey through Parwana and its offshoots.
Partners with and supports food related festivals and organisations including Womadelaide, Tasting Australia and Oz Harvest.
Draws on her ancestral foodways and associated rituals to challenge dominant narratives around Afghanistan, around the West’s relationship to it, and to tear through artificial separations.
