Meet The Authors
Whispering Walls
Choman Hardi
Choman Hardi is a multi award-winning author of critically-acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation.
Since 2010, poems from Choman's debut English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of the English GCSE curriculum in the UK.
Choman's second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society, and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also translated into French in 2020. A selection of Choman's poems was published in Italian in 2017.
Read more about Choman Hardi here...
Past Participle
Oh, Sugar
Jane Labous
Jane Labous is a multi award-winning author, journalist and filmmaker writing the human and human rights stories of our time.
Jane read English & French at Jesus College, Oxford, before spending nearly two decades as a journalist reporting from the frontlines for international press and INGOs, most often out of Senegal, West Africa, while also developing her creative art as a writer and novelist.
Jane's debut novel, The Chameleon Girl, is published in Nigeria by Lagos-based publisher, Farafina Books, and available on Amazon. Jane's fiction has been longlisted for prizes including the Bath Novel Prize 2022 and the Santa Fé Writers Project Literary Award 2022.
As a devoted single parent, Jane often writes stories and characters to honour her wonderful daughter, who is half-Senegalese.
Read more about Jane Labous here...
Winter Sun
Inner Core
Miki Lentin
Miki Lentin took up writing while travelling the world with his family a few years ago. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in 2020, and was a finalist in the 2020 Irish Novel Fair for his first book, Winter Sun.
Miki has been placed highly in competitions including the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize, Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Award, and Leicester Writes. Miki has been published in Litro, Storgy, Story Radio, and MIR, among others.
In 2022, Miki published a collection of short stories with Afsana Press, called Inner Core, documenting death, anxiety, masculinity, family and children and social good. Critics called it 'consistently enthralling... funny, moving and disturbing in equal measure'.
Miki volunteers with refugee charity Breaking Barriers and with foodKIND in Greece, and dreams of one day running a café again.
The Good, the Bad and the Gringo
Kae Bahar
Kae Bahar is a writer and filmmaker. He grew up in Kurdistan under the regime of Saddam Hussein and was arrested and tortured by the secret police at the age of fourteen. With his family’s help, he managed to escape to Italy to avoid a second arrest and possible death.
Once in Europe, he worked as an actor and produced films for major broadcasters. What kept Kae’s hope alive was storytelling and watching films. Most of his films have won multiple awards. The Good, the Bad, and the Gringo is his first novel.
Read more about Kae Bahar here.
The Glass Wall
The Man Who Was a Tree
Goran Baba Ali
Goran Baba Ali has written and published various literary and journalistic works in Kurdish, Dutch and English.
The Glass Wall is Goran's debut novel in the English language. As an ex-refugee, originally from Iraqi Kurdistan, Goran has personally experienced some of the protagonist’s hardships in this novel, including a few weeks living in a desert.
Goran left Iraq in 1994, and has since lived in several countries. He studied sociology in Amsterdam, and in 2019, he completed an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
The Last Pomegranate Tree
Bachtyar Ali
A prominent Kurdish intellectual, Bachtyar Ali has written 40 books, including 12 novels, as well as a number of essay books and collections of poetry. His novels have become instant bestsellers in both Iraq and Iran. .
The Last Pomegranate Tree also sold over 25,000 in German. In 2024, it featured on the list of the 100 best books of the 21st century in the respectable German-language Swiss newspaper NZZ. His novels have been translated into Persian, Arabic, Turkish, German, Italian, French and English, a renown very few authors writing in the Kurdish language enjoy.
Read more about Bachtyar Ali here..
The Almond Garden of Kabul
Mandana Hendessi
Mandana Hendessi (OBE) has spent over thirty years working on women’s rights and empowerment in some of the world’s most fragile places. Between 2008 and 2016, she lived and worked in Kabul, often visiting Afghanistan’s largest women’s prison – a place of dimly lit cells, whispered confidences, and bolani frying on makeshift stoves. Over countless glasses of tea, she listened to stories of injustice and defiance that would inspire The Almond Garden of Kabul.
Her debut novel carries the voices of those women – raw, courageous, and unforgettable. Mandana is also the author of The Kurds: The Struggle for National Identity and Statehood (Agenda Publishing, 2024) and co-author of The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration: Beyond Western Research (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023). Her article on the criminalisation of Afghan women’s sexuality, written as a prelude to The Almond Garden of Kabul, appeared in Missing Perspectives in 2023.
The Last Pomegranate Tree
Kareem Abdulrahman
Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator and Kurdish affairs analyst. From 2006 to 2014, he worked as a Kurdish media and political analyst for the BBC, where translation was part of his job. In 2013, he was awarded a place in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s prestigious mentorship programme.
He translated Bachtyar Ali’s I Stared at the Night of the City into English (UK; Periscope; 2016), making it the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English. He is also the Head of Editorial at Insight Iraq, a political analysis service focusing on Iraq and Kurdish affairs. He lives in London. The Last Pomegranate Tree is Bachtyar Ali's second book translated by Abdulrahman.