Bachtyar Ali Add a review

Bachtyar Ali (Kurdish pronunciation: [bəxtɪː'ɑːɾ 'ʕəli]; Sorani Kurdish: بەختیار عەلی, romanized: Baxtyar Alî; born 1960), 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.

Since the mid-1990s, Ali has been living in Germany (Frankfurt, Cologne and most recently Bonn). In his academic essays, he has dealt with various subjects, such as the 1988 Saddam-era Anfal genocide campaign, the relationship between the power and intellectuals and other philosophical issues. He often employs western philosophical concepts to interpret an issue in Kurdish society, modifying or adapting them to his context.

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. In the same year, his novel Duwahamin Henari Dunya ("The World's Last Pomegranate") was translated into German by Rawezh Salim and Ute Cantera-Lang under the title Der letzte Granatapfel ("The Last Pomegranate").