Bakhtyar Ali
Bachtyar Ali Muhammed بەختیار عەلی
Bachtyar Ali Muhammed is a Kurdish novelist, intellectual, literary critic, essayist, and poet. Ali started out as a poet and essayist, but has established himself as an influential novelist from the mid-1990s. He has published thirteen novels, and several collections of poetry and essays. In 2016 his novel Ghezelnus u Baxekani Xeyal ("Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination") was published in English under the title I Stared at the Night of the City. The first Kurdish-language novel to be published in English, it was translated by London-based journalist and translator Kareem Abdulrahman.
Translated Titles by Bachtyar Ali Muhammed
I Stared at the Night of the City
Iraqi Kurdistan at the turn of the twenty-first century is a territory ruled by strongmen, revolutionaries, fixers, bureaucrats, and the "Barons" who control everything from livestock and land to Kurdish cultural life. Defying the absolute power wielded by the Barons, a band of friends led by an enigmatic poet embark on an odyssey to find the bodies of two lovers killed unjustly by the authorities. The Barons respond by attempting to crush these would-be avengers--but their real war is waged against the imagination itself, a prized, elusive commodity to which intellectuals, merchants, political elites, and humble workers all seek access in one way or another. Told by several unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscope of fragments that all eventually cohere, the novel immerses readers in the fantastic just long enough, before wrenching them back to hard, cold "real life."