Sayed Asef Hossaini was born in 1980 in Balkh, Afghanistan, and grew up as a refugee in Iran. After the collapse of the Taliban, he returned to Afghanistan and studied sociology and philosophy at Kabul University. He ran for a parliamentary seat in the 2005 elections as an independent candidate. In 2008, he received a German scholarship to study public policy at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt. From 2011 to 2016, he conducted his doctoral research on power structures in Afghanistan’s rural communities at the same school. Currently, he is working as an online editor at Deutsche Welle. He has published five books, including poetry anthologies and political notes.