Award-winning Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim launches 'The Iraqi Christ'

'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' - The Guardian

English Pen

**Winner of the 2009 and 2012 English PEN Writers in Translation Award**
**Long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010**

Join us this evening in London for the launch of the highly anticipated second collection from award-winning Arabic writer Hassan Blasim.

'Iraq's story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like Blasim's to tell it.'
- Intelligent Life

'Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic... his taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.'
- The Independent

'At first you receive it with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony & hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic & the quotidian in the same reading moment.'
– M John Harrison.


About the book
A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…
A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims…
Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war…

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor, a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

About the author
Hassan Blasim is a poet, filmmaker and short story writer. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city’s Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films Gardenia(screenplay) and White Clay (screenplay & director) won the Academy’s Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years. In 1998 he left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the pseudonym ‘Ouazad Osman’, fearing for his family back in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship. In 2004, he moved to Finland, where he has since made numerous short films and documentaries for Finnish television. His stories have previously been published on www.iraqstory.com and his essays on cinema have featured in Cinema Booklets (Emirates Cultural Foundation). After first appearing in English in Madinah, his debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was translated by Jonathan Wright and published by Comma a year later (2009). Madman was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010, and has since been translated into Finnish, Spanish, Polish and Italian. A heavily edited version of the book was finally published in Arabic in 2012, and was immediately banned in Jordan. Hassan has won the English PEN Writers in Translation award twice, and was recently described by The Guardian as ‘perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive’. This is his second collection.

Supported by English PEN and Arts Council England
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