Скачать или смотреть Iraqi literature in exile (in Arabic)

The Iraqi diaspora in Europe can count a significant number of intellectuals and artists amongst its ranks. Through their literary, artistic and other works, they bear witness to the constant process of negotiating their identity, imposed by the fact that they belong in several places all at once. During this evening, along with journalist and writer Joan Cañete, we will be holding a conversation with two essential voices in contemporary Arab literature, both of whom have had works published in Spanish in 2016.

El loco de la plaza Libertad (The Madman of Freedom Square) is the first volume of short stories by Hassan Blasim, a writer and filmmaker who has resided in Finland since 2004. Mixing the phantasmagorical with the starkly real, in a style that has been compared with Roberto Bolaño’s because of his penchant for macabre comedy, Blasim immerses readers in the individual destinies of the people who lived through the institutionalized paranoia of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraq war and the later American occupation, of those who had to emigrate and endure human trafficking and the nightmare of trying to build a new life in Europe.