Salim Barakat

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet, born in Qamishli, northern Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic language in Damascus for a year, before moving to Beirut in 1972, where he published five collections of poetry, two novels and two volumes of autobiography. In 1982, he moved to Cyprus to work as an editor on the prestigious Palestinian literary journal Al-Carmel, under its chief editor Mahmoud Darwish. Whilst there, he published a further seven novels and five poetry collections. In 1999, he moved to Sweden, where he now lives. His work explores aspects of Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian and other cultures found in northern Syria.