Butterfly Valley

Sherko Bekas was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, son of the poet Fayaq Bekas, and published his first book when he was 17. He joined the Kurdish liberation movement in 1965 and worked in the movement's radio station (the Voice of Kurdistan). In 1986, he left his homeland because of political pressure from the Iraqi regime and from 1987 to 1992, he lived in exile in Sweden where Butterfly Valley was printed in January 1991, around the time of the first Gulf War. Shortly afterwards, following the uprisings in the Kurdish and the Shiite regions in March 1991 Bekas was able to retrun to Iraqi Kurdistan. He died of cancer in Stockholm, Sweden on 4 August 2013. Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, her family fleeing to Iran in 1975 after the Algiers Accord but returning to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. Having been forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign, she arrived in the UK in 1993 as a refugee. She studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London and 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 and a collection of English poems Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004). A former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! she has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. She was a resident poet for 10 months at Scotland's National Writing Centre in 2004 and was a recipient of a Jerwood / Arvon Young Poet's Apprenticeship. In 2014, she was appointed lecturer in the Department of English and Journalism at the American University of Iraq – Sulaimani, a post she still holds.