Onjali Q. Raúf is a women’s and refugee human rights activist and a multi award-winning children’s author.
She is the founder and CEO of Making Herstory which works to end the abuse, enslavement and trafficking of women and girls in the UK, and O’s Refugee Aid Team which mobilises aid convoys and funds to help frontline refugee response teams across northern France and beyond.
She is the author of Sunday Times bestseller, The Boy at the Back of the Class, which won both the Blue Peter Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2019; The Star Outside My Window, The Night Bus Hero, The Great Food Bank Heist and The Lion Above the Door. In January 2022, she was awarded an MBE for her services to literature and women’s rights.
Onjali is also an Ambassador of Walk With Amal and the Museum of the Home (London), a Patron of VIP Reading, Facefront Theatre, and NIA Women, and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought.
An alumni of the Cambridge University Senior Faith in Leadership programme, she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 most influential women in 2019 together with Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Djamila Ribeiro amongst others. Her first children’s play on issues faced by child refugees in the UK, The Hero Next Door, is due to be staged at the end of 2022.