• Source: Salim Barakat

      • Salim Barakat (Arabic: سليم بركات, Kurdish: Selîm Berekat; born 1 September 1951 in Qamishli) is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet. He is considered one of the innovative poets and novelists writing in Arabic. Since the 1970s, he has published numerous novels, poetry collections, biographies and children's books. Several of his works have been translated into Kurdish, English, French, German, Swedish and other languages.


      Life and career


      Barakat was brought up in the city of Qamishli in an area in northern Syria with a large Kurdish population and spent most of his youth there. In 1970 he moved to Damascus to study Arabic literature but after one year he moved to Beirut where he stayed until 1982. While in Beirut he published five volumes of poetry, a diary and two volumes of autobiography. He moved to Cyprus and worked as a managing editor of the prestigious Palestinian journal Al Karmel, whose editor was Mahmoud Darwish. In 1999 he moved to Sweden, where he still resides.
      He wrote about Kurdish culture, as well as Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Circassian and Yazidi culture. His earliest major prose work, Al-Jundub al-Hadidi (The Iron Grasshopper), is an autobiography of his childhood in Qamishli.
      Stefan G. Meyer said "Barkat's style is probably the closest by any Arab writer's to that of Latin American magical realism" and has called Barakat "perhaps the master prose stylist writing in Arabic today".
      In the 2006 anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil", an excerpt from his novel Jurists of Darkness (1985) in English was published by Words Without Borders.
      According to online magazine Literary hub, Barakat had been one of the official candidates for the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.


      Published works




      = in English

      =
      An excerpt from his novel Jurists of Darkness. In: Literature from the Axis of Evil : Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations: A Words Without Borders Anthology. 2006. New York: New Press.
      Salīm Barakāt, Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen. 2021. Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems. London: Seagull Books, ISBN 9781803091952.
      Salīm Barakāt and Huda J. Fakhreddine. 2024. The Universe, All at Once: Selected Poems. London: Seagull Books, ISBN 9781803094038.


      = in Arabic

      =

      I


      See also


      Syrian literature


      References




      External links


      Excerpt from Salim Barakat's novel The Feathers

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