Stems from Darkness: The Kabul Hotel Attack, in Fragments and Memory
“A magnificent and striking chronicle of hope and of trust in life rebuilt through trials, bombs, and collapse — from Canada to Afghanistan to Rwanda. A work of testimony that bears witness with precision to the upheavals of our age.”
— Edem Awumey - author of Descent Into Night, recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award of Canada
Paul Farran is a Canadian artist and writer from Montreal, with roots in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean.
He has spent more than two decades working in international affairs across five continents on issues related to global governance, development cooperation, and humanitarian action, including work in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Vietnam with the United Nations and other international institutions.
He holds a master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Montreal.
His writing sits at the intersection of memoir, lyric essay, and reported nonfiction.
Stems from Darkness is his first book, conceived alongside a companion album as a single continuous work across music and text.
“So he went into the abyss, to learn what darkness asks of light, what silence owes to sound, what hatred remembers of love.”
A hybrid literary memoir in which a Canadian UN worker survives the 2008 Taliban attack on the Kabul Serena Hotel.
On January 14, 2008, Paul Farran is hiding behind a swimming pool in Kabul, covered in another man's blood. Two gunmen have entered the Serena Hotel. Seven people are killed. One attacker, Qari Muhammad Ramazan, a young man from Pakistan's tribal regions, is captured alive, with a suicide vest he could not bring himself to detonate.
Eleven years later, Paul begins to write.
Stems from Darkness follows two braided narratives. The first is his own, tracing the years surrounding the attack, moving across nine countries, carrying the night forward. The second traces Ramazan: through survivor interviews, research into the mindset of suicide bombers, and letters written to him in a Kabul prison. In 2021, when American forces withdraw and the Taliban retake the country, Ramazan walks free. The letters never reach him.
Written in fragments, combining memoir, lyric essay, reported nonfiction, and epistolary form, this is a book about conflict and its long shadow. It holds the tension between stranger and enemy, denying the distance that makes violence easy to consume and forget.
Stems from Darkness is a continuous project, including the book, a full-length musical album, and an immersive musical audiobook in development.
The book is expected in late 2026 / early 2027.