Hassan Blasim: The black humour of the Iraq Wars
– Iraq
Hassan Blasim (* 1973) is a film director and writer of Iraqi origin. He writes in Arabic and is a Finnish citizen. He left Iraq in 2000 to escape persecution for his films, like The Wounded Camera, among others, shot in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and dealing with the forced migration of Kurds under the regime of Saddam Hussein. After four years of traveling around Europe, he settled in Finland in 2004, where he was granted asylum.
Blasim made four short films for the Finnish broadcasting company Yle. His collection of short stories Madman of Freedom Square was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His book of short stories The Iraqi Christ was published in English in 2013, and a year later Hassan Blasim became the first Arabic writer to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2014, Penguin US published a selection of his short stories under the title The Corpse Exhibition. The collection won numerous awards, including the English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme Awards which was shared with three other books.