Fiction
Raghad Qasim: ‘Hair or No Hair’
Azher Jirjees: An Excerpt of ‘Sleeping in the Cherry Field’
Jalal Hassan: ‘Serenity of the Moon’
Hawara al-Nadawi: An Excerpt from ‘Qismat’
Abdullah al-Sakhi: And Excerpt from ‘Pathways of Loss’
Nonfiction
Al-Bayati: ‘When I Met al-Sayyab in 1947’
Ali Shakir: Translating My Jewish Grandmother
Balqis Sharara: ‘When Darkness Falls’: On the Shortened, Brilliant Life of Iraqi Author Hayat Sharara
Adonis: ‘When al-Sayyab Visited Beirut in 1957’
Hassan Blasim: ‘A Refugee in the Paradise that is Europe’
Poetry
Ra’ad Abdulqadir: ‘The Song of the Eternal Citizen’
Ahmed Abdul Hussein: ‘In the Name of God’
10 Translated Poems by Fawzi Karim (1945-2019)
Ghareeb Iskander: ‘Song of Myself’
Interviews
Hawraa Al-Hassan: On Reading Resistance and Collaboration in Iraqi Novels
Azher Jirjees: Writing an Iraqi Postman in Norway
Bachtyar Ali: ‘The Last Pomegranate’
Dunya Mikhail: ‘The Bird Tattoo’: Between Horror and Peace in the Sinjar Mountains
Mortada Gzar: Black Basrans and ‘Broom of Paradise’
Ghareeb Iskander: Reading T.S. Eliot in Arabic
Fadhil al-Azzawi: A Poetry Not in Service of Dictators or Despots
Emily Drumsta: On Nazik al-Mala’ika and ‘Revolt Against the Sun’
In Focus: Iraq
This January 2022, we share our first “In Focus” section, edited by Hend Saeed. For “Canonical Works & New Voices,” we asked a number of Iraqi writers, translators, and scholars to put together a list of their highlights from Iraqi literature. In “30 Reads: A Month of Iraqi Women Writers,” we have 30 days of reading suggestions by women writers, originally composed in Arabic or Kurdish. Explore more special features below, with more from our archives on the left.
“I remember reading “Yusuf’s Tales” the day it appeared in a newspaper in Iraq. That there’s no collection of short stories by Muhammad Khudayyir is a shame.”
Translator and scholar Shakir Mustafa.
Featured Fiction
#PublishThisTranslation
Poetry
Listicle
Interview
Scholarship
Profile
Recommended Anthologies
‘Contemporary Iraqi Fiction,’ ed. Shakir Mustafa
