Poet, playwright, and translator, Dilawar Karadaghi is an Iraqi Kurd, born in Sulaimaniyah in 1963. Karadaghi’s poems speak of events that Kurdish literature has missed or abandoned in the oily muddle of politics, wars, and the bloody brothers’ battles for posts and money. Events such as a child’s death for lack of basic medication, the sudden coming of age, and the inexhaustible occurrences of heartbreaks humans cause each other. Dilawar has studied Theatre in the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad (1986). He directed his first play by the name of Master and His Servant in 1985. He published his first collection of poems, A Statue from Rain, in 1992. Since then, he has published ten books of poetry, including his most comprehensive book, Here and There Rain, a Far-flung Sunshine (2020). Karadaghi is a member of the Swedish and Iraqi Writer’s Union, and as an accomplished translator with over sixty books, poetry collections and plays translated from Swedish, Persian and Arabic into Kurdish, including many of Nikos Kazantzakis’ and Theodore Kallifatides’ notable novels.

About Karadaghi’s poems, renowned writer and poet Bachtyar Ali says, “His poems are extremely transparent, in the sense that his words paint a very clear picture, and yet his expressions are extremely deep to a point of overwhelming the readers in abysmal meaning; his expressions are those used in daily lives, nevertheless, there is always a sudden surrealistic leap from the language of everyday norms to a world in which its dimensions are much further from the first glimpses of the transparent picture; it is the sudden escape of simplicity from simplicity, it is the escape of reality from reality… in his poems Dilawar appears to be an ordinary person who suddenly grows a pair of surreal wings, takes flight as a traveler but never reaches a destination.” Because of their striking vividness and simplicity, Dilawar’s poems have been used by various artists.

Bachtyar Ali’s full speech in Kurdish can be read here.