Salim Barakat سليم بركات / Selîm Berekat | |
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| Born | 1 September 1951 Qamishli, Syria |
| Occupation | novelist, poet |
| Language | Arabic |
| Nationality | Syrian |
| Genre | Magical realism, children's literature |
| Years active | 1973-present |
| Notable works | Jurists of Darkness, Come, take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems |
Salim Barakat (Arabic: سليم بركات, Kurdish: Selîm Berekat; born 1 September 1951 in Qamishli) is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet. He is considered one of the innovative poets and novelists writing in Arabic. Since the 1970s, he has published numerous novels, poetry collections, biographies and children's books. Several of his works have been translated into Kurdish, English, French, German, Swedish and other languages.
Barakat was brought up in the city of Qamishli in an area in northern Syria with a large Kurdish population and spent most of his youth there. In 1970 he moved to Damascus to study Arabic literature but after one year he moved to Beirut where he stayed until 1982. While in Beirut he published five volumes of poetry, a diary and two volumes of autobiography. He moved to Cyprus and worked as a managing editor of the prestigious Palestinian journal Al Karmel, whose editor was Mahmoud Darwish. In 1999 he moved to Sweden, where he still resides.[1]
His works explore his own Kurdish culture and chronicle their plight and history,[2] as well as Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Circassian and Yazidi culture.[1] His earliest major prose work, Al-Jundub al-Hadidi (The Iron Grasshopper), is an autobiographical narration of his childhood in Qamishli. The book explores the violent and raw conditions of his early adolescent life, suffused with nostalgic feelings for the Kurdish land and culture. The first part of the book's lengthy subtitle translates to, "The unfinished memoir of a child who never saw anything but a fugitive land."[3]
Barakat is considered one of the most innovative poets and novelists writing in the Arabic language.[2] Stefan G. Meyer has described his style as "the closest by any Arab writer's to that of Latin American magical realism" and has called Barakat "perhaps the master prose stylist writing in Arabic today". Due to his complex style and application of techniques taken from classical Arabic literature, his influence has been almost one of a "neoclassicist."[3]
In the 2006 anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil", an excerpt from his novel Jurists of Darkness (1985) in English was published by Words Without Borders.[4]
According to online magazine Literary hub, Barakat had been one of the official candidates for the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.[5]
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