Afsana Press signs UK edition of Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree

Afsana Press has signed the UK rights for the literary novel The Last Pomegranate Tree by multi-award-winning Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali.

The book is the first agented work published by Afsana Press, to be released on 16 September 2025 in paperback.

The package of rights signed between Afsana Press and Bachtyar Ali, via the author’s agent Mertin Witt Literary Agency, includes also the rights for Commonwealth (excluding Canada), Europe and Asia.

The Last Pomegranate Tree has received a large number of praise and reviews, including a starred review by Kirkus, praising the book as a novel that has blended magical realism with dark fables “worthy of Kafka”.

“Altogether extraordinary: a masterwork of modern Middle Eastern literature deserving the widest possible audience,” according to Kirkus Review.

Also Publishers Weekly’s starred review stated that the novel is “Kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing”.

“Ali’s novel is a visionary wonder that plunges into the dreamscape of a people’s fraught memory. For readers, this is unforgettable,” Publishers Weekly said.

The novel is translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, and was first published by Archipelago Books in the US and Canada in 2023. It is also translated into six other languages, including French, Italian, Arabic and Turkish.

“After being held in a desert prison for 21 years, a Peshmerga fighter in Iraq desperately searches for his son, setting off on a quest guided by memory and myth in this imaginative novel,” The New York Times said, describing the subject of the book.

“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.” So begins Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree, a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict.

Muzafar-i Subhdam, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, Muzafar begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region.

An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths, The Last Pomegranate Tree interrogates the origins and reverberations of atrocity. It also probes, with a graceful intelligence, unforgettable acts of mercy.

The BBC said about Bachtyar Ali that he is a “leading novelist who marks a new era”.

Bachtyar Ali is a “model novelist … like Achebe and Pynchon, Morante and Ortese, who knew how to give a concrete anthropological and narrative foundation to their vision – one made of tragedy and poetry, or rather, the fairytale and the epic. A balance that few writers in the world are still capable of achieving,” said La Domenica – Il Sole 24 Ore.

The book can already be pre-ordered via Afsana Press website, or via retailers such as Waterstones and Amazon.

Cover reveal soon.   

About the author

Bachtyar Ali was born in Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1966. He has established himself as an influential novelist since the mid-1990s. His books have become instant bestsellers in both Iraq and Iran. Today, Ali is one of the most famous contemporary Kurdish writers, with over 25,000 copies of each of his novels sold in Kurdish (Sorani). His novel THE LAST POMEGRANATE TREE sold 25,000 copies in German. In 2024, the novel was named among 100 best books of the 21st century by Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) Germany. In 2009, Ali received the first HARDI Literature Prize, awarded by the largest cultural festival in the Kurdish part of Iraq. In 2014, he was awarded the newly-founded Sherko Bekas Literature Prize, in 2017 the prestigious Nelly-Sachs-Prize, and in 2023 the Hilde-Domin-Prize. This latter prize is given to writers who live in exile in Germany and publish in German language. Ali has been living in Cologne and Wuppertal, Germany, since 1998.

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