Kurdish Literature as World Literature

As well as discussing Ali's novel and contemporary Kurdish literature, in this conversation moderated by Dr Farangis Ghaderi, we probe questions such as the politics of publishing and translating minoritized languages and literatures, literary translation as challenging the dominant West-centered vision of world literature, and the opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls of literary translation.

The Last Pomegranate Tree is set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict. After being held in a desert prison for 21 years, Muzafar-i Subhdan, a Kurdish peshmerga fighter, in Iraq desperately searches for his son, setting off on a quest guided by memory and myth. Ali’s realist magical novel – a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory - reflects on the origins and reverberations of atrocity, probing fatherhood and the corrupt world created by the Kurdish political class.

Bachtyar Ali is one of the most prominent contemporary intellectuals from Bashur (Iraqi Kurdistan). His novels have been translated into Persian, Arabic, Turkish, German, Italian, French and English. He has written nearly 40 books, including 12 novels, as well as a number of essay books and collections of poetry. In 2017, he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize in Germany, joining past recipients such as Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood and Javier Marías. He is the first author writing in a non-European language to do so. He lives in Cologne, Germany (For a more detailed profile, see this link.)

Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator and Kurdish affairs analyst. From 2006 to 2014, he worked as a Kurdish media and political analyst for the BBC, where translation was part of his job. He translated Bachtyar Ali’s I Stared at the Night of the City into English (UK; Periscope; 2016), making it the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English.  His second translation, The Last Pomegranate Tree, also by Ali, came out in January 2023 (Archipelago Books). He is also the Head of Editorial at Insight Iraq, a political analysis service focusing on Iraq and Kurdish affairs. He lives in London.