Ainur Karim

Ainur Karim is a playwright and screenwriter born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She studied law and has worked in the field of human rights, implementing projects on education and social services for socially vulnerable groups. Her plays revolve around the lives of Kazakhstan women, their undervalued work, and the clash between traditional culture and modern globalization. In 2022, Karim was an honorary fellow in writing at the Iowa International Writing Program (USA). The same year, Chins Up! Shoulders Back! was a finalist for the Pen America Women in Translation Reading Series 2022. Karim works as a screenwriter for YouTube and TV series, translator, and yoga teacher. She currently lives in Thailand.

During her residency, Ainur plans to work on the second part of her novel with a working title The Girl from Stan. In the first part, Who will bury you?, we meet her heroine, who is trying to substitute an unborn son for her parents. In the second part, the heroine finds herself in the big city of independent Kazakhstan during the oil boom of the 2000s, overcoming gender and origin stereotypes, struggling with her family’s expectations of her as a daughter, and maintaining her own personal boundaries.