Zarsanga, laureate of the Aga Khan Music Awards 2022

Zarsanga is a singer from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan who is known as the Queen of Pashtun Folklore for her career-long devotion to the orally transmitted musical traditions of the tribally organised Pashtuns.
On 31 October 2022, she was celebrated as one of the laureates of the Aga Khan Music Awards at the ceremony held in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, at the Royal Opera House of Musical Arts.
Until the age of 14 she was a shepherd. Her performance career began when a local musician heard her sing at a wedding and introduced her to a local radio producer. She went on to sing on Radio Pakistan and develop an enthusiastic national following.
Zarsanga has said that people on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border earnestly enjoy her songs, evoking an imagined transnational Pashtunistan. Her repertoire includes love poems, called landay, and other songs of the nomadic Kuchi Pashtuns, often accompanied on tabla and rubab. For her contributions to the field of music and folk singing, Pakistan awarded Zarsanga the Pride of Performance Award (Tamġa-ē Ḥusn-e Kārkardagī). In 2018, her music video was released on the TH-cam channel of the popular Pakistani television programme Coke Studio, garnering close to 7 million viewers.