Choman Hardi

Choman Hardi (Kurdish: چۆمان هەردی‎),(born 1974) is a contemporary Kurdish poet, translator and painter.

She was born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan, the daughter of poet Ahmad Hardi. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign. She arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London. She did her PhD at University of Kent focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran. She has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish. She has published two collections of English poems, Life for Us (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) and Considering the Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2016. Her articles have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation

She has been a former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! and has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. She was former Poet-In-Residence at Moniack Mhor Writers Centre (Scotland), Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), Hedgebrook Women Writers’ Retreat (USA) and The Booth (Shetland). As an academic researcher she has been a visiting scholar in The Centre for Multiethnic Research (Uppsala University), Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) and The Department of Humanities (University of Amsterdam). Between 2009 and 2011 she was a Senior Associate Member of St Anthony’s College, Oxford. In 2014 she moved back to her home-city of Sulaimani to take up a post at the American University of Iraq (AUIS), becoming chair of the department of English in 2015.

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