Salim Barakat Explained

Salim Barakat
سليم بركات / Selîm Berekat
Birth Date:1 September 1951
Birth Place:Qamishli, Syria
Language:Arabic
Nationality:Syrian
Genre:Magical realism, children's literature
Notableworks:Jurists of Darkness, Come, take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems
Occupation:novelist, poet
Years Active:1973-present

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

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

in English

Novels

Poetry

Autobiographies

Collections

I

Children's books

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Contributor's Profile - Salim Barakat. Banipal (UK). Feb 10, 2011.
  2. Book: Nassar. Hala Khamis . Najat . Rahman . Mahmoud Darwish, exile's poet: critical essays . Interlink Books. 978-1-56656-664-3 . 342 . 2008.
  3. Book: Meyer, Stefan G.. The experimental Arabic novel: postcolonial literary modernism in the Levant . SUNY Press. 0-7914-4733-2. 87–88. 2001.
  4. Web site: 2012-03-10 . Literature from the Axis of Evil – Telegraph Blogs . 2023-11-15 . https://web.archive.org/web/20120310064714/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ceriradford/3642741/Literature_from_the_Axis_of_Evil/ . 2012-03-10 .
  5. Web site: 2022-09-30 . Some Predictions For Who (Should) Win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature . 2023-10-18 . Literary Hub . en-US.

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