A collection of poetry from acclaimed yet underrepresented Kurdish poet Farhad Pirbal. Like that of his contemporary Abdulla Pashew, Farhad Pirbal's poetry is a chronicle of exile and displacement, longing and not belonging. The poetry is in turns wistful and disoriented,reflecting his role as a dissident and persecuted prisoner. "Poète maudit" of Kurdistan, Pirbal is known as well for his highly publicized antics as for his prolific literary output. Pirbal, born in 1961, “may be the greatest innovator of Kurdish literature in the twentieth century, in both poetry and prose” (Shook, Poetry Foundation).
Farhad Pirbal (born 1961) is an iconic Kurdish writer, poet, painter, critic, singer, and scholar, who has lived in Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Germany, Denmark, and France, where he obtained his Ph.D. in History of Contemporary Kurdish Literature at the Sorbonne. Publishing since 1979, Pirbal has authored more than seventy books of writing and translation and serves as one of Kurdistan’s farthest-reaching voices. In 1994, he founded the Sharafkhan Bidlisi Cultural Center in Hawler. In 2024, marking his English-language debut, Deep Vellum will publish his collected poems, Refugee Number 33,333, and his debut short story collection, The Potato Eaters.
