Abdulla Pashew is the most important Kurdish poet of our time. Born in the Kurdish region of Erbil in Iraq in 1946, Pashew published his first poems in 1963, and his first poetry collection came out in 1967. He has published a total of ten collections, the latest of them in 2019. Consisting of almost 400 pages of English translations of Pashew’s selected works from 50 years, “Dictionary of Midnight” came out in 2018, and three volumes of his collected works in Kurdish were published last year. His poetry has also been translated into Swedish, German, Italian, Greek, French, Arabic, Persian, Russian and other languages. A linguist and university professor, Pashew has also translated world literature from the original language into Kurdish, including works by Walt Whitman and Alexander Pushkin. In Pashew’s poetry, various themes coexist in harmony, ranging from the stages and issues of the struggle for an independent Kurdistan to personal love poetry. Pashew is known as a powerful performer, and every time he visits Kurdish areas, his poetry readings attract huge audiences of thousands of people. Until now, very few people have known that Abdulla Pashew, one of the prominent figures in the Kurdish-speaking world, has been living in Finland since 1995. Pashew’s poems in Kurdish will be read to the audience in Finnish by Minna Torppa, the translator of the poems.
