Homaira Nakhat Dastgirzada

Dastgirzada died from cancer on 4 September 2020. Four days later, her funeral was held in Utrecht attended by 200 people. Then-President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, called her death an " irreparable loss to the cultural and literary community."

Homaira Nakhat Dastgirzada was born at Masturat Hospital in Kabul. Her mother was from Herat, a traditionally popular city of Persian literature. Dastgirzada started writing poems aged twelve, which would later be published in magazines. She would eventually produce literary and artistic programs for Afghan National Radio and Television in 1983. She achieved a doctorate in Persian literature at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. She played a key role in establishing literary program to students in universities and schools in Kabul, and was a well known public figure.

She married in 1982 and has two children, Hariwa and Hajir. After the hardline Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, Dastgirzada secretely set up a women's poetry club in Kabul. She moved to the Netherlands in 1999, where she settled with her family in the city of Utrecht and co-founded the Association of Afghan Writers and Poets in Exile with other Dutch Afghan artists.

Homaira Nakhat Dastgirzada (Dari: حمیرا نکهت دستگیرزاده) (17 May 1960 - 4 September 2020), best known as Nakhat, was a well known Afghan poet. She wrote numerous pieces of Persian literature that were "very lyrical, with a lot of imagery." Dastgirzada was nicknamed the Blue Poet of Afghanistan (شاعر آبی افغانستان)