Rafida Bonya Ahmed, better known by her pen and stage name Bonya Ahmed, is a Bangladeshi-American author, humanist activist and blogger.
Biography
Ahmed was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She completed her undergraduate degree in Computer Information Science from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Ahmed met her husband, Avijit Roy, through their writing on Mukto-Mona, the first online platform for Bengali speaking freethinkers, atheists, and secular bloggers and writers founded by Avijit. This group started the first celebration of Darwin Day in Bangladesh. Mukto-Mona was internationally recognised in 2015 and received The BOBS jury award. Ahmed wrote Bibortoner Path Dhore, one of the first popular science books in Bangladesh about biological evolution. She is one of the moderators of Mukto-Mona. Ahmed has a daughter, Trisha Ahmed, from her first marriage. Trisha wrote an article with her stepfather Avijit for the Free Inquiry magazine about imprisoned secularist bloggers. Ahmed was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2011 and went into remission after extensive treatment. On 26 February 2015, Ahmed and Roy were attacked by machete-wielding Islamic extremists while they were visiting Dhaka on a book signing trip. They were attacked in the middle of the street at a very crowded book fair. Roy died after he was taken to the hospital and Ahmed was gravely injured. Ahmed decided to take a leave of absence from her job as a senior director at a credit bureau in the US after the attack. She started working with the humanist associations in Europe and the US to raise awareness about the attacks on the secular intellectuals in Bangladesh by Islamic fundamentalists, and in July that year gave the British Humanist Association's Voltaire Lecture. She is currently doing research work on Islamic fundamentalism as a visiting research scholar at University of Texas at Austin. She received the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Forward" award in 2016. She is a member of the jury of Deutsche Welle's The BOBS Best of Online Activism Award. On 20 April 2018, Ahmed gave a TEDx Talk in Exeter, explaining how she recovered from the 2015 terrorist attack that left her husband dead and herself physically and emotionally scarred for life.
