About the Author

Sedika Weingärtner

Also published as Sedika Zhobel

A writer who reads the great movements of power through the lives they touch, beginning with her own.

Sedika Weingärtner, portrait in a turquoise jacket against a softly lit background.

Origins

Sedika was born Sedika Zhobel in Kabul. Two hundred years earlier her ancestors, a Persian-speaking family from Kashmir, had settled in the city, at a time when Kabul, Peshawar and Kashmir still belonged to one shared cultural world.

She grew up in a house where Persian poetry was part of daily life. Her grandfather, Mohammad Haider Zhobel, taught the history of Persian literature at Kabul University. Her father, Mohammad Osman Zhobel, was a jurist who devoted forty-five years to legality and justice. She has written that he introduced her to the Charter of the United Nations when she was six years old.

An intellectual formation

From her father she inherited the conviction that law exists to protect every person, and that a country’s strength lies in its diversity rather than in isolation. From her grandfather she inherited a devotion to language as the memory of a civilisation.

She left her homeland at twenty-five. The distance became part of her perspective: the view of someone who knows a place from within and has watched, from abroad, how decisions taken elsewhere reshaped it.

Writing and geopolitical inquiry

Her writing moves between two scales. The Lost Daughter of the Hindu Kush follows Afghanistan’s history through empires, borders and ideologies, and through the experience of one family. The Brzezinski Paradox turns to the global chessboard and re-examines, for diplomats and general readers alike, the strategic assumptions that guided Western policy for a generation.

What unites them is a method: setting received narratives beside sources, testimony and lived experience, and presenting the result as argument, open to debate.

Identity, justice and cultural memory

At the heart of her work stands the Persian idea of dad, justice as rightful order, and its opposite, bidad. She writes about the Persian language as a civilisational inheritance and about the freedom of women as a measure of any society’s health.

Her “lost daughter” is not a person but a symbol of identity, language, freedom and justice, and her books are an attempt to bring that symbol home.

دادdad بیدادbidad اوou

Author philosophy

And I am merely the pen, the very pen my father entrusted to me, that has set out to give this voice an unshakable, analytical structure.

From the preface to The Lost Daughter of the Hindu Kush

Books

Cover of The Lost Daughter of the Hindu Kush by Sedika Zhobel: the author in a dark suit before sunlit peaks of the Hindu Kush.

The Lost Daughter of the Hindu Kush A personal and political history of Afghanistan, and of the identity, language and justice it lost.

Cover of The Brzezinski Paradox by Sedika Weingärtner: Zbigniew Brzezinski and the author before a sepia globe.

The Brzezinski Paradox A concise handbook that reads Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard against the multipolar realities of 2026.

Interviews, lectures and readings

For media requests, speaking invitations and rights enquiries, please get in touch.

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