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Salim Barakat

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Salim Barakat
سليم بركات / Selîm Berekat
Born (1951-09-01) 1 September 1951 (age 72)
Qamishli, Syria
Occupationnovelist, poet
LanguageArabic
NationalitySyrian
GenreMagical realism, children's literature
Years active1973-present
Notable worksJurists of Darkness, Come, take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems

Salim Barakat (Arabic: سليم بركات, Kurdish: Selîm Berekat; born 1 September 1951 in Qamishli) is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet. He is considered one of the innovative poets and novelists writing in Arabic. Since the 1970s, he has published numerous novels, poetry collections, biographies and children's books. Several of his works have been translated into Kurdish, English, French, German, Swedish and other languages.

Life and career

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Barakat was brought up in the city of Qamishli in an area in northern Syria with a large Kurdish population and spent most of his youth there. In 1970 he moved to Damascus to study Arabic literature but after one year he moved to Beirut where he stayed until 1982. While in Beirut he published five volumes of poetry, a diary and two volumes of autobiography. He moved to Cyprus and worked as a managing editor of the prestigious Palestinian journal Al Karmel, whose editor was Mahmoud Darwish. In 1999 he moved to Sweden, where he still resides.[1]

He wrote about Kurdish culture,[2] as well as Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Circassian and Yazidi culture.[1] His earliest major prose work, Al-Jundub al-Hadidi (The Iron Grasshopper), is an autobiography of his childhood in Qamishli.[3]

Stefan G. Meyer said "Barkat's style is probably the closest by any Arab writer's to that of Latin American magical realism" and has called Barakat "perhaps the master prose stylist writing in Arabic today".[3]

In the 2006 anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil", an excerpt from his novel Jurists of Darkness (1985) in English was published by Words Without Borders.[4]

According to online magazine Literary hub, Barakat had been one of the official candidates for the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.[5]

Published works

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in English

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  • Salīm Barakāt, Huda J Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen. 2021. Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems. London: Seagull Books, ISBN 9781803091952.

in Arabic

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Contributor's Profile - Salim Barakat". Banipal (UK). Retrieved Feb 10, 2011.
  2. ^ Nassar, Hala Khamis; Rahman, Najat (2008). Mahmoud Darwish, exile's poet: critical essays. Interlink Books. p. 342. ISBN 978-1-56656-664-3.
  3. ^ a b Meyer, Stefan G. (2001). The experimental Arabic novel: postcolonial literary modernism in the Levant. SUNY Press. pp. 87–88. ISBN 0-7914-4733-2.
  4. ^ "Literature from the Axis of Evil – Telegraph Blogs". 2012-03-10. Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  5. ^ "Some Predictions For Who (Should) Win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature". Literary Hub. 2022-09-30. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
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