9 Short Stories by Iraqi Women, in Translation

By ArabLit Staff

Today, the last in our Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth) Wednesday series of “9 Stories” lists. In 2021, we featured short fiction by Sudanese and South Sudanese women, by Algerian women, by Egyptian women, and by Syrian women, all in translation. This year, we added nine-story anthologies of work by Palestinian, Lebanese, and Moroccan women writers, also in translation.

We close Women in Translation Month 2022 with a brief anthology of short stories by Iraqi women.

When critic Ferial Ghazoul wrote about the Iraqi short story back in 2004, she already highlighted the elements of the “fantastic” and the “strange,” which have — if anything — accelerated in the last eighteen years. Again, in this ad hoc collection, we focus on what’s available online; thus we have no stories from Haifa Zangana, Duna Ghali, or May Muzafer, and no women’s short stories originally written in Kurdish and translated to English seem to be available online.

Yet with Iraqi women’s writing, there was a wealth available online, from Daisy al-Amer (b. 1935) to younger writers like Yasmeen Hanoosh and Raghad Qasim. You can also find more, much of which hasn’t been translated, in our “30 Reads: A Month of Iraqi Women Writers.”

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Hadiya Hussein’s “Tunnels,” translated by Shakir Mustafa

Raghad Qasim’s “Hair or No Hair,“ translated by Zeena Faulk

Yasmeen Hanoosh’s “The Guardian Angel,” translated by Levi Thompson

Salima Saleh’s “The Mulberry Tree,” translated by William Hutchins

Lutfaya al-Dulaimi’s “What the Storytellers Did Not Tell,” translated by Shakir Mustafa

Buthaina al-Nasiri’s “The Death of a Dog,” translated by Gretchen McCullough, with Mohamed Metwalli

Lutfiya al-Dulaimi’s “What the Storytellers Did Not Tell,” translated by Shakir Mustafa 

Daisy al-Amir’s “The Next Step,” translated by Sharif Elmusa and Thomas Ezzy

Samira al-Mana’s “Tropical Jungles,“ translated by Farida Abu-Haidar