A New Look at Kurdish Literature, Beyond the ‘Selfless, Helpless’ Trope

Next year, Henar Press will bring out its first two titles, translated from Kurdish to English. But already, their website — with its Kurdish Literary Database — is contributing to a wider discussion around and sharing of Kurdish literature. In this brief online chat, publisher and editor-in-chief Aryan Omar Hassan talks about why he wanted to start Henar Press, why they’re looking for experimental literature, and what they’d like to see in their submissions inbox.

Can you tell us a bit about how Henar Press came to be? How did you settle on the name? And how did it come to be in the somewhat unlikely location of Columbus, Ohio?

Aryan Omar Hassan: I would love to say there was a eureka moment, but really it was the cumulative result of pent-up frustrations and disappointments. I knew there were incredible works by Kurdish writers out there that literary agents wouldn’t represent presumably because it wouldn’t sell—unless it’s another tragic memoir where Western readers are made to feel sympathetic for those fighting ISIS and not much else. So I decided to try my hand at tackling the issue myself. I’m surprise it’s taken this long, to be honest.

I’m always fascinated by people’s response to the name of the press because to me it sounds quite clichéd (I’m almost embarrassed by it sometimes). But people seem to like it. Henar means pomegranate which is the icon of Kurdistan, almost stereotypically so. But I never saw it that way. When I spent my summers in Sulaymaniyah as a kid, the one thing I appreciated beyond everything else was the taste of the pomegranates. Every night I would go to bed with a bowl of pomegranate arils and salt. I would have pomegranate all the time in the UAE, but it just tasted like a completely different fruit. The taste of Kurdish pomegranates takes me back me to a time when things ostensibly seemed simpler. Coming to the realization now as an adult of all the horrors happening behind the scene makes challenging the image I’ve constructed of pomegranates (and Kurdistan) even more relevant.

Going with Henar Press instead of Pomegranate Press was important as well, because the sound of the word in Kurdish has a unique soft quality that gives a melancholic, somber texture. And nostalgia is a very visceral and complicated emotion. The texture of words is crucial to the identity of Henar Press. It goes beyond retaining the Kurdish words for the sake of keeping the language alive. Actually, our first publication, Gabor, was originally submitted under the title “The Cattle’s Cry,” which is a perfectly fine translation. But there’s a quality of the word Gabor that cannot be replicated in English. When you accentuate the word ‘Gabor,’ it feels as though you’re bellowing on the bull’s behalf.

As for Columbus, my whole life I’ve lived all over the world: Norway, Sweden, England, the UAE, Kurdistan, and now the United States. This is just where home currently is for me. I’m lucky enough to have found the love of my life here, so it’s hard to imagine starting the press anywhere else.

I see from the Henar Press website that you are trying to — as we are, at ArabLit — unsettle what people think about as Kurdish literature, moving away from reductive portrayals that satisfy a colonial sweet tooth and toward a representation of great literature and literary innovation. Why did you decide to set your focus as “experimental literature”? And what do you mean by “experimental”?

AOH: Unsettled is a beautiful way to describe what we’re trying to do as well. I remember being in a course about the Ottoman Empire, and the professor discreetly agreed with a student who said 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq was one of the best things to happen to the careers of historians interested in the Middle East. They weren’t wrong. Academics were getting book deals left and right.

But its literary implications couldn’t be more devastating. The more attention a country receives from the West, the more fighting chance it has for a global, commercial audience. Major book deals, fellowships, tours, etcetera. But this provides a Western audience with what you called a ‘colonial sweet tooth,’ e.g., pure junk calories that either reinforce their viewpoints or let them feel good about opposing them. More importantly, it takes away from the truth.

Hassan Blasim is a huge inspiration. During an era when Arabs and Middle Eastern people were begging to be viewed as normal in the West (Post 9/11 and 2003), Blasim instead portrayed a very ugly, disturbing view of Arabs. Not because they’re Arabs, but rather that they’re people first. I believe this viewpoint is not only honest, but essential.

Many people to this day still adopt the view of Kurds that’s been pushed by the West, mainly that we’re a selfless people who solely pursue what’s morally right in light of an immoral world. But as anybody knows about humanity, that’s simply not true. Kurds, like all people, are deeply flawed and are coming to terms with our own histories of violence and how we’ve perpetuated violence and trauma, especially against our own people.

I can imagine how some Kurdish writers with a global audience in mind may be afraid to portray themselves that way because they worry it might remove their strategic position in how the West sanitizes the Kurdish identity. I think what’s more important is to humanize ourselves so we can portray Kurds as people rather than pawns.

I’ve spoken with many translators and writers about how difficult it is to publish works that complicate this constructed Kurdish identity. Many publishers have only wanted works that portray Kurdistan as a should be utopia and Kurdish people as selfless, helpless, purely good-hearted people. Ironically, I don’t believe many of those novels exist, because Kurdish writers care about the truth. What’s happened instead is you have are popular feel-good books about Kurdish culture written by non-Kurds (which I won’t name here out of respect for those well-intentioned authors).

If you don’t write (or publish) your own people’s stories, someone else will.

Knowing that we were the only press in North America dedicated to Kurdish literature in translation, I kept second guessing whether we should’ve taken a more neutral and less controversial tone. The pressure of ethically representing an entire history of people felt insurmountable at times. But when I received one of our first promising submissions (Gabor), I knew I had to stick to my gut instinct.

Gabor is such a vile and disturbing novel with characters from all backgrounds who have one thing in common: their selfishness and myopic motives during wartime. It instantly took me back to Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition.

So ‘experimental’ is the broadest term I could use to encourage Kurdish writers to really take their craft and flip it on its side. Many publishers have asked Kurdish writers to construct a novel that explains Kurdistan to the West. I want the polar opposite. I want to be disillusioned.

Selfishly, that’s also the type of literature I consume. The novel that changed me was Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. From that moment, I knew there was something transcendental about literature that could only be experienced by contorting language and narrative into forms we haven’t previously encountered.

You also have “AGAINST FORGETTING” written in large letters on what is otherwise a fairly spare and straightforward sidebar of your website. Can you talk a little about that phrase?

AOH: For much of my life, I was told I was Iraqi and never questioned it because I look Iraqi. Swedes everyone called me what they call other Middle Eastern immigrants: svartskalle, which is a slur towards people with a “black head.” And when we spoke Kurdish at home, and I just assumed that’s a language Iraqi people speak. But when we moved to the UAE, I started questioning who we were because all the other Iraqis at school spoke Arabic. When I’d tell them I’m Iraqi, they’d start speaking Arabic and I couldn’t understand anything.

When I asked my mom about this she eventually told me we’re Kurdish. My mom is very private. It takes years, sometimes decades, to uncover parts of her life. But I’ve realized why she didn’t want me to know I’m Kurdish. She experienced a lot of trauma by the Baathist regime that most Kurds, especially women, are familiar with: being kidnapped by the moral police, held at gunpoint, witnessing family members and friends getting abducted, being stalked by people assigned to kill her, having to flee as a refugee, receiving death threats while abroad.

Against forgetting reminds me of what we could lose if we choose to forget rather than confront.

Tell us about the press’s first two novels, coming in 2026.

AOH: I’ve already mentioned Gabor (translated by Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo) a few times, so let me start there. It’s a very difficult novel to describe. Despite being graphic in its depiction of war, there’s a lightness and humor that manages to make you laugh during the most despicable moments. SeyedQader Hedayati is a master trickster who’s never afraid to take you to the most uncomfortable and absurd places. The novel is a Bildungsroman following two friends who live in a neighborhood under the oppressive surveillance of a nearby military outpost. They’re scrambling to find enough money to buy a soccer ball so they can form their own proper football team and be taken seriously by the other teams. When they finally get the ball, the victory is short-lived as it’s accidentally kicked into the outpost’s yard, and from there all hell breaks loose (almost literally). As a lifelong Vonnegut fan, this novel is everything I could ask for and so much more.

I Am Going to Kill Somebody (translated by Jeannette Okur), on the other hand, is a literary thriller that pays homage to the great 19th-century existential novelists, many of whom Firat Cewerî himself translated into Kurdish (Dostoevsky being the biggest influence). The novel follows a 42-year-old man living with his mother following his release from prison. He wakes from a nightmare with a voice in his head telling him that he will kill somebody today. I don’t want to spoil the rest since it truly lives up to its premise. It’s sardonic, smart, contemplative, and wholly isolating. Firat is a legendary writer in Sweden, and we couldn’t be more honored to serve as his English debut.

We’re also working on an anthology of contemporary plays titled Who’s Afraid of Kurdistan? which we’re still collecting submissions for.

For authors and translators who might want to submit to Henar, what advice would you give them?

AOH: One thing I’m really proud of is that because we’re such a small team, every manuscript we publish goes through a lot of revision and editing. So I always tell people to try their best, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Literature can’t be perfect.

I encourage people to send me anything. If you’re an aspiring poet, writing a memoir, science fiction, hard-boiled detective novel, I’m interested in reading it. Reading manuscripts is possibly the best job I could ever asked for.

My only advice would be not to work from a didactic approach. Put yourself at the mercy of the language the way a reader would. If your writing/translation doesn’t surprise yourself, or if you can define it simply, then there might be fundamental flaws that are way more important than typos or grammar. Those surface level issues matter the least.

Can you tell us a bit about the landscape for Kurdish literary translators? What kind of support is there for translation from Sorani, Kurmanji, Zazaki, Garshuni into other languages, particularly into English?

AOH: That’s a difficult question. Translation residencies and fellowships abroad are also highly selective and wouldn’t choose translators without critically acclaimed works under their belt. But this quickly becomes a chicken-and-egg situation because their output would be much more prolific if they were able to receive a residency to focus solely on their craft.

I do know of a few Kurdish writer-translators who were able to receive fully-funded graduate programs that supported their goals. Mainly, Shene Mohammed, who studied at the University of Iowa’s MFA literary translation program. But it can be difficult to obtain a visa from Kurdistan. And of course, there are many hidden fees associated with moving across the world that can make these opportunities simply unattainable.

For training from Kurdish to English, organizations like the Zahra Institute in Chicago and Indiana University Bloomington offer excellent Kurdish language courses. Professor Haider Khezri has also written a textbook on Sorani Kurdish. Since I’m based in Ohio my knowledge beyond the US is limited, though I’ve heard of great programs in Germany and England. Things get much trickier for Kurdish languages other than Sorani and Kurmanji.

We have people on our team, such as Shene Mohammed who works as the director of translation at the Kurdistan Center for Arts and Culture and Nawa Amin who works at Kashkul at the American University of Iraq in Slemani, that are dedicated to helping us find new and established translators that we can work with. Our goal is always to provide translators with the opportunities they need to dedicate more time to their passion. We want translation to become a more viable and rewarding path.

What would you like to change about the support for these translators & translations? 

AOH: Supporting translators is extremely important to me. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to start my own press rather than joining one. To be frank, I don’t believe the publishing landscape cares much about translators. Many publishers view translators as a means to an end. It doesn’t surprise me that translators feel the most fear with the rise of AI since they’ve always been seen as the most replaceable.

We pay ourselves, the translator, and writer the same percentage for each book sale because we view translators as crucial to the work as the writer. Many people think a book translated by two different people is the same book through different lenses. I vehemently disagree. Those are two fundamentally different works. Translation is magic. It’s really the process of bringing something from the eight dimension into the third.

Although Henar’s first two works are translated from Kurdish, you have a multilingual focus. How will you balance a support for Kurdish translation with an interest in Kurdish literature more broadly, written in any language?

AOH: As much as I focus on the Kurdish language, people write in various languages for various reasons, and I never want to see the diaspora as a more diluted Kurdish experience. It simply isn’t the case. It’s a perspective and identity that’s just as important.

That’s why our view of Kurdish literature is very inclusive. As long as you identify as Kurdish, the language you write in won’t affect your chances of being published. I can think of many Kurdish writers who’ve made monumental breakthroughs writing in what some might call languages of the colonizers (Arabic, Turkish, English). I myself write very poorly in Sorani!

However there is an endangerment of other Kurdish dialects, so we pay special attention to ensuring those are represented too.

I must admit, I not only swooned for your Kurdish Literary Database, but continue to swoon every single time I return to it. How did this come into being? It’s so robust — how do you keep it up, especially the online portion? Is the aim to be completist, or will you limit to significant publications (at least for the online portion)?

AOH: Funnily, the database predated the press. I was so desperate to find any Kurdish books that whenever I came across something on Google, I started writing it down because I knew I’d never find it again. I wanted to make it available online so people could read the actual texts and not just the analyses, which is all that’d show up when you search for Kurdish literature. The goal had always been to be as comprehensive as possible, regardless of how unattainable that is.

When I started the Henar, I uploaded the database up as an online Excel sheet. Hannah Fox, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, reached out with more titles to add. I got responses from lots of people, but Hannah was on a different level. I’ve never met anybody as knowledgeable about Kurdish literature in translation. Her Master’s thesis was on Kurdish literature.

We eventually spoke over Zoom and she asked how she could contribute more. I was shocked because she’d already doubled or tripled the database. I told her I was overwhelmed with the press but had always wanted to add an online section. I told Hannah not to overwork herself and a few weeks later I got an email with nearly 500 online entries.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve procrastinated by jumping from poems to short stories to essays to interviews until it’s well past midnight. I knew this was something special, so I talked to Hannah about showcasing it at Stanford’s Kî ne em? Kurdish studies conference. The organizers were impressed and offered Hannah to present in-person. I quickly worked on making the database prettier.

We also archived the online publications using archive.org to avoid losing the works if the websites were to permanently shutdown. That’s already happened to some Ali Bakhtyar translations. I’m really happy we did that.

So, thank Hannah for all her hard work!

Could you please start a magazine of Kurdish literature in translation?

AOH: I can’t say too much yet but keep an eye out for 2026. Since we’re such a small press, we can only accept a limited number of works annually. But we receive many excellent short stories and poems that aren’t book-length and it breaks my heart to turn them away. We’re looking to remedy this since there’s a real need for a bilingual literary magazine.

If you’re interested in supporting any of our ventures, we will be running a fundraiser through October. And since we’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, all donations are considered tax deductible.

Those interested in supporting Henar Press can find the fundraiser through Give Lively.