Wasfia Nazreen

Wasfia Nazreen grew up in Bangladesh in a country with essentially no mountaineering tradition and almost no high-altitude terrain of its own, a background that made her decision to attempt the Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent, an unusual undertaking to explain to sponsors and the public alike. She funded much of her early climbing herself, framing the project explicitly as "Bangladesh on Seven Summits," an attempt to put her country on a map it had never featured on in this sport.

Completing the Seven Summits meant years of expeditions to Everest, Denali, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson in Antarctica and Puncak Jaya in Indonesia, each requiring different technical skills, climates and logistics, and each funded through a patchwork of sponsorship, personal savings and public appeals rather than a single well-resourced national programme.

Alongside her climbing she has been an outspoken activist for the rights of Indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, an area where Indigenous peoples have faced land seizure and violence with little national attention, and has spoken publicly about being queer in a country where doing so carries genuine legal and social risk, choices that have made her a more controversial figure at home than her mountaineering alone would suggest.

She completed her Seven Summits project in 2015, becoming the first Bangladeshi to do so, and has continued to combine expedition work with activism, treating the summits less as personal trophies than as leverage for causes she considers under-represented in Bangladeshi public life.