The Yarsanis are a unique ethno-religious group centered in Kermanshah, in Iranian Kurdistan. With estimated adherents surpassing one million, this little-known syncretic religion dates from the 14th century and has elements reminiscent of Zoroanstrianism and other non-Islamic traditions, and is central to The Shadeless Border, Iranian Kurdish writer and folklorist Jiyar Jahan Fard’s first novel…
Nahai, who hails from Iranian Kurdistan, is regarded as one of the leading contemporary novelists writing in Kurdish. Birds in a Gale, originally published in 2002 and set in the Iran of the 1990s to consider the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is one of his most celebrated novels and demonstrates both his…
Sertac Karan, a Turkish-Kurd and the protagonist of this absurdist black comedy, is a would-be writer who is alienated from society and much given to procrastination. From childhood, his exorbitant imagination shines at creating outlandish characters, which, when he is an adult, will become actual delusions, as his fantasies invade and undermine conventional reality. First…
Of all the horrors of this benighted century, the genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of ISIS a decade ago stands out for its extreme brutality and inhumanity. At the time, few people outside the region were aware of the group’s existence; as non-Muslims (Yazidism has pre-Zoroastrian roots), Yazidis were specifically targeted. The world…
Kurdistan + 100 poses a question to contemporary Kurdish writers: Might the Kurds one day have a country to call their own? With 13 stories all set in the year 2046—exactly a century after the first glimmer of Kurdish independence, the short-lived Republic of Mahabad—this book offers a space for new expressions and new possibilities…