Kajaki Press is an indie book publisher and a literary journal. We also offer services to help you with your own book projects.
Bio
Kajaki Press is the brainchild of Afghan-American author Mir Tamim Ansary.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tamim Ansary came to the United States as a junior in high school. History, culture, and memoir have been among his lifelong preoccupations. His new book, The Invention of Yesterday, looks at world history as the story of the emerging global “we”. Ansary has also written a history of the world through Islamic eyes, a literary memoir about being bicultural, a historical novel set against the background of the First Anglo-Afghan war, and some 30 nonfiction books for children. Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted won the Northern California Book Award for nonfiction in 2009, and his first memoir West of Kabul, East of New York was selected as a One City One Book pick by both San Francisco and Waco, Texas. In 2001, an email he sent to 20 friends reputedly became the first viral phenomenon of the Internet Age, reaching tens of millions around the world within days.
Origin Story
Long ago, when I was a child living in Afghanistan, my family used to go once a year to a tiny town called Kajaki, located near the headwaters of the Helmand River in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.
There, Afghans and Americans working together had built an epic hydroelectric plant, which provided energy to a quarter of the country.
After the dam was built, a man named Mr. Corriega stayed on to make sure the plant ran smoothly. He wasn’t required to do anything besides keep the lights on, but he opted instead to transform the unoccupied town of Kajaki from a bland work site into a Garden of Eden. He built lavish wrought iron fences for empty houses; hung painted paper lanterns in streets where no one drove, and repaved the empty sidewalks with colorful mosaics.
He was a Gaudi no one knew about and Kajaki was his cathedral – a sacred place where people from opposite sides of the planet once came together for the herculean task of turning the waters of a river into power and light.
Inspired by this history; our mission at Kajaki Press is to spread power and light through the written word. We’re dedicated to the proposition that the world is full of Mr. Corriegas: working in solitude; driven by instinct; patiently crafting cathedrals no one has seen.
-Tamim