24th ilb
5 – 14 Sep 2024 Program
9 – 18 Sep 2024 Young Program

Herkunft: Iraq

Usama Al Shahmani

Usama Al Shahmani was born in Baghdad in 1971 and grew up in Qalat Sukar (Al Nasiriyah). He studied Arabic language and modern Arabic literature, published three scholarly literary books and became an assistant at the University of Baghdad. While he was writing his dissertation, he had to flee his

Sinan Antoon

Sinan Antoon, poet, novelist and translator, was born in Baghdad in 1967 to an Iraqi father and an American mother. He studied English literature at university in the Iraqi capital. After the 1991 Gulf War he moved to the USA, where he continued his studies at Georgetown and at Harvard,

Shahad al-Rawi

Shahad Al Rawi was born in 1986 in Baghdad. After attending the Al Mansour school, she graduated from the University of Damascus. In 2016, she published her first novel »Sa’at Baghdad« (Eng. »The Baghdad Clock«, 2018). The story is set in a well-to-do neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, at a

Samuel Shimon

born in 1956 in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, left his home country in 1979. Nowadays Shimon lives in London. Shimon is a writer of short stories and poems as well as a publisher of anthologies. His debut novel »An Iraqi in Paris« (2005/2011) was highly praised by the critics. In the Arab

Pius Alibek

Pius Alibek was born 1955 in Ankawa in Kurdish Iraq into a Chaldean-Assyrian family and studied English in a Jesuit seminar in Bagdad. After completing his military service he went to Barcelona. He speaks Aramaic, Arabic, Kurdish, English and Spanish as well as Catalan, which he uses for his literary

Najem Wali

Najem Wali was born in the Iraqi city of Basra in 1956. He studied German literature at the University of Baghdad. In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, he chose exile. Wali studied German studies at Hamburg University and Spanish literature at the University Complutense of Madrid. The author

Muhsin Al-Ramli

Muhsin Al-Ramli, also known as Muhisin Mutlak Rodhan, was born in 1967 in northern Iraq. In 1988, he began working as a journalist and newspaper editor in Iraq and Jordan and wrote columns and reportages for various magazines in the Arabic-speaking world. He has lived in Madrid since 1995. He

Margaret Obank

born in Leeds, UK, has a first degree in philosophy and English literature from Leeds University and a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Birkbeck College, University of London. With the Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, she co-founded the English-language magazine of modern Arab literature »Banipal« in 1998, with the aim

Karosh Taha

Karosh Taha was born in Zaxo in Kurdistan Region in 1987. When she was nine years old, her family fled to Germany. Karosh Taha majored in English and history to become a teacher, and taught at a school in Essen until 2018.Her debut novel, »Beschreibung einer Krabbenwanderung« (2018, tr: Description

Jabbar Yassin Hussein

Jabbar Yassin Hussein was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1954. After the Ba’ath party seized power again in 1968, he joined the Communist party at the age of fourteen. He was repeatedly arrested and tortured on account of his political activities, even while he was still at  school.  (He was,

Hussain Al-Mozany

Hussain Al-Mozany was born in 1954 in the Iraqi city of Amarah and grew up in Baghdad. He left his country in 1978 for political reasons and went to Lebanon, where he worked as a journalist in Beirut. In 1980 he came to Germany and studied Islamic studies, German literature