Iraq

Poetry

Poems by Abdulla Peshew

Abdulla Peshew was born in 1946 in Erbil. Between 1970-1973 he worked as a teacher in Erbil. In 1973 he traveled to the Soviet Union (USSR) and studied at the Institute of Foreign Languages in...

Poems: Abdulla Peshew May 11 2023

Poetry

Poems by Farhad Shakely

The poet Farhad Shakely (1951) was born in the province of Kirkuk, in southern Kurdistan. Shakely was an active opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime. He joined the Kurdish liberation movement as...

Poems: Farhad Shakely April 06 2023

Poetry

Selected Poems by Mizar Kemal

Mizar Kemal is an Iraqi poet and journalist. He is a guest writer in the Swedish city of Stockholm. These poems were translated in a workshop in the city of Umeå, north of Sweden, during the...

Poems: Mizar Kemal May 29 2022

Interview

Interview with the Iraqi author Hassan Blasim

Hassan Blasim is a writer, poet, and film director who has been called "perhaps the best living Arab writer.” His international breakthrough was with his acclaimed collection of short stories Iraqi...

By: Kholod Saghir June 10 2021

Article

The ideal choice for a young Iraqi poet

“When life finally reached us / I was inside a coffin running around,” writes the Iraqi poet Ali Thareb in one of his early poems. Ali was born in 1988 in the city of Babil in Iraq. These lines...

Text: Ali Thareb March 10 2021

Poetry

In a place where memories are not cherished

Rasha Alqasim, exile writer from Iraq, writes a furious, desperate poem about displacement and its aftermath

TEXT: Rasha Alqasim September 11 2018

Fiction

I write to the one I love

"I challenge myself: write, your heart is yours regardless of your mother tongue or the tyrant’s language. Rapidly I transform into a brave lover—exactly, I will write to my dearest."

TEXT: Dlovan Kassab September 11 2018

Interview

Darkness over Mosul – about journalism and ISIS in Iraq

For Iraqi journalist and writer Nawzat Shamdin, the meaning of the word home has come to be redefined during the two years he has lived in Skien, Norway. For over a decade, through his work as a...

Text: Afrah Nasser March 10 2016