Åsne Seierstad

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Åsne Seierstad (born February 10, 1970) is a Norwegian freelance journalist. In 2001 she followed the Northern Alliance into Kabul after the fall of the Taliban government. She stayed with a bookseller, Sultan Khan, and his family there and wrote a book about it: The Bookseller of Kabul. When Khan later read this book, he was very unhappy with the way she had described him and his family; he claimed that he was falsely portrayed as a tyrant, when all he had done was to invite Seierstad to be a guest in his home. Seierstad claimed that she had simply described things the way she experienced them. The novel paints an unflattering portrait of Khan as a seeker after freedom and liberal values in his country whilst at the same time maintaining an iron grip on his family, and in particular its female members.

In 2003 she reported from Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq.