‘We can’t give up on Afghans’: Lyse Doucet on The Finest Hotel in Kabul

Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988 as Soviet troops were withdrawing, expecting a brief stay. She remained for almost a year, and the hotel became her first Afghan home and, decades later, the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, which has won the Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Doucet hopes the win will draw attention back to a country she says has largely slipped from the headlines and where “none of us should be ready to accept a situation in which we live in a world where there is a country where girls cannot be educated after they’re 16, where women cannot go to university, where women are barred from so many jobs.” The Intercontinental, built by the British in the late 1960s, offered a lens on a different Afghanistan: Kabul once known as the “Paris of the east,” alive with fashion, jazz and foreign visitors on the hippy trail, where Ahmad Zahir performed and Gloria Gaynor stayed.

As politics convulsed the country, the hotel stayed open.

Afghanistan, Kabul

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