On Censorship, Resistance, and the Limits of Archiving Kurdish Literature

Founder of the experimental Kurdish literature publisher Henar Press, Aryan Omar Hassan, and researcher Hannah Fox are taking on the monumental task of building a database of Kurdish literature in English. Along the way, they have encountered difficulties of classification: where national borders become irrelevant, linguicide lingers, and the way writers identify themselves is complex and varied. In this essay, they outline how they approach building a robust archive and its importance, while wrestling with larger questions of responsibility, identity, and representation.

This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

Supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

Finding Kurdish literature in translation is more challenging than most realise. Beyond a handful of translated poems online, it is much easier to find discussions about Kurdish literature than to discover the actual texts themselves. A librarian might recommend one of Farhad Pirbal's collections from Deep Vellum (2024), Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree published by Archipelago Books (2023), or perhaps Sleeping in the Courtyard, a 2025 anthology of Kurdish writing from University of Arkansas Press. However, even the University of Rochester’s impressive Translation Database – the sole resource of its kind, containing data on over 11,000 translated books – only records nine titles translated from Kurdish, despite there being some thirty to forty million Kurdish speakers in the world. Is the lack of availability of Kurdish literature in English the fault of publishers pursuing profits over people? Not exactly. The answer is far more complicated and bloody due to the centuries worth of censorship, genocide, and linguicide still affecting Kurds to this day. Nowhere is this exemplified more clearly than in the draconian imprisonment of novelist and poet Meral Şimşek by Turkish authorities. The indictment made reference to her short story, ‘Arzela’, included in Comma Press’s anthology Kurdistan +100: Stories From a Future State (2023), where thirteen writers imagine an independent Kurdish future.

When PEN International put out its call to action against Şimşek’s 2021 sentencing, it was devastating how little traction the campaign received outside of the already close-knit Kurdish community. This is all to ask: How do we communicate the urgency and complexity of the work involved in building what we understand to be the most comprehensive database of Kurdish literature available in English? Through Henar Press, established in 2024 as the first North American nonprofit dedicated to publishing Kurdish literature, we have developed the Kurdish Literary Database, which currently features 194 book-length works and 470 online entries, with new texts being added frequently.  

One of the biggest challenges in building this database has been around how we define ‘Kurdish literature’ in the first place. National literary canons are often connected to the concept of a nation-state, but the Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of their own. We could choose to define Kurdish literature in terms of language — like how ‘Arabic literature’ would usually refer to literary texts written in Arabic, for example. However, we believe that classifying literature as Kurdish solely in terms of language is too restrictive, because it does not take into account the complexities of the Kurdish political context. Kurdish writers have often written in a language other than their mother tongue due to decades of restrictive laws and censorship enforced by the various governments of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey on their Kurdish populations, or out of personal choice. Poets like Salim Barakat and Golan Haji from Syria, for example, have published multiple poetry collections in Arabic, and writers like the great novelist Yaşar Kemal wrote in Turkish. Kemal is arguably the closest the Kurds have come to a Nobel Prize contender. He famously described himself as a ‘Turkish writer of Kurdish origin’, despite writing articles condemning Turkey’s genocidal policies towards Kurds. In particular, two essays published in 1995 – ‘The March of Lies’ and ‘The Dark Cloud Over Turkey’ – resulted in a twenty-month prison sentence for the writer. Kemal’s stance on whether he was specifically a Kurdish writer was not challenged at the time — perhaps because he often spoke at length about the thousand years of shared history between Kurds and Turks. For him, denying the mutual influence of their languages, peoples, and cultures was nonsensical, and only fuelled the divisive rhetoric seeking to erase their complicated history.

Archival work can be motivated by purely intrinsic factors, but it is undeniably a political stance 

Burhan Sönmez, a contemporary Kurdish novelist and the President of PEN International, sees his own writing as simultaneously Turkish and Kurdish. As a Kurd who grew up within the Turkish education system at a time when Kurdish was banned, Sönmez has described the ‘impossibility’ of writing in a language other than Turkish, stating in an interview at the European Literature Festival in 2016 that ‘we didn’t have any option’. However, for writers like Sönmez, Kurdishness is not only about language but also about narrative style and content. In the same interview he suggested that ‘when we write in Turkish, actually, we are at the same time writing in Kurdish’. By this he was referring to the Kurdish traditions of oral storytelling that he believes are carried through in the style of his writing. While most of his novels have been written in Turkish, he recently published his first novel in Kurdish, Lovers of Franz K., which was translated into English in 2025 by Sami Hêzil. Can we really say that only this latest book can be classified as Kurdish literature and exclude his novels originally written in Turkish from the Kurdish Literary Database? 

Questions around language are further complicated by the fact that, as a North American nonprofit publisher, Henar Press’s database focuses on Kurdish works in English. Many of these texts have been translated into English — not only from Kurdish, but also from various languages of the Kurdish diaspora, such as German and Swedish. When categorising literature as ‘Kurdish literature in English’, we face the question of whether a text’s language of origin should affect whether we include it in the database in English translation. In fact, while researching Kurdish literature for the database, we have been surprised by the vast range of source languages for the texts we have found, as well as the bridge languages used to carry them into English. Hiva Panahi, for example, self-translated her poetry from Kurdish Sorani to Greek, which was then translated into English by Zoe Valaoritis for Panahi’s collection of poetry, Secrets of the Snow (2016). Suna Arev’s stories travel from Turkish to English via French translations. Several publishers have not specified the source language of a text but simply note that it is translated.  

There are examples of texts in the database that include phrases and passages in multiple languages intentionally left untranslated, which further complicates any simple system of categorising text by language in the database. The title of Agri Ismaïl’s story, ‘شیرین و فه‌رهاد’, for example, is presented in Kurdish Sorani script, while the story is mostly written in English but with both Swedish and Kurdish speech mixed within the text. As such, it is an interesting example of a multilingual Kurdish text. In addition, it is not always possible to name only one or two translators for a text, since many Kurdish translations involve a collaborative process, often relying on the use of bridge translations. This is partly due to the lack of Kurdish-English translators as well as the limited availability of high-quality resources like dictionaries. The Poetry Translation Centre in London and The Poetry Project in Berlin both work in this collaborative way, and several poems from each project feature in our database. In some of these examples the translators are not named at all — particularly when poems and stories are unofficially published by enthusiastic readers on informal platforms, or when groups of translators are involved in bringing the poem to English via a chain of other languages. In addition to categorising translated literature, we have also included the works of Kurdish poets and authors writing directly in English, such as the poetry of Choman Hardi in the UK and of Holly Mason Badra in the US. We believe this reflects a broad and inclusive view of Kurdish literature that is not limited to national or linguistic boundaries. 

Badra has had to navigate a similar dilemma in her ambitious anthology, Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (2025), the first of its kind to broadly feature prose, poetry, and even a graphic novel excerpt within a single collection. While the anthology includes translations of work from numerous writers working in Kurdish Sorani and Kurmanji, a significant portion of the texts are by writers working in English while living in the diaspora — Hajjar Baban, Tracy Fuad, Pınar Banu Yaşar, and Badra herself, to name a few. The collection also features translations from Arabic, Swedish, and Turkish. Given the forced displacement of Kurds and the resulting necessity to adopt other languages, this holistic and inclusive approach to categorising Kurdish literature is vital. Diasporic voices offer pivotal insight into the Kurdish experience, as regions outside Kurdistan now contain their own generations-old communities and histories. To limit Kurdish literature linguistically would be to become complicit in the very linguicide that has denied writers the ability to write about their experiences in the first place.  

Land is perhaps the connective tissue that binds Kurdishness and its literature for many writers, but even this connection has its complexities. After Yaşar Kemal’s death in 2015, The Nation’s Piotr Zalewski spoke to Kemal’s friends to try to settle the debate over whether he was more Turkish or Kurdish. The suggestion came that perhaps the best way to describe him was geographically — ‘as Anatolian’. Kemal’s allegiance was not to a nation but to land. This will resonate strongly with anyone who has read his magnum opus, Memed, My Hawk (1961), where the Taurus Mountains arguably function as the tetralogy’s central protagonist.  

To limit Kurdish literature linguistically would be to become complicit in the very linguicide that has denied writers the ability to write about their experiences in the first place

When considering texts for inclusion in the database, we have faced questions around whether to include texts by writers who are not known to be Kurdish, but may have a connection to the land or experiences of the Kurds. Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language (1988), written after his visit to Turkey with Arthur Miller following the 1980 coup, generated much discussion when it was first performed due to its connection to Kurdish themes. The play features unnamed mountain captives forbidden by an officer from speaking their language. While many interpreted the play as a political statement on the persecution of Kurds in Turkey, Pinter himself denied this simplistic interpretation. Even though Sönmez lists Mountain Language as noteworthy reading on the Kurdish experience in Turkey (and we agree), it is not listed within the Kurdish Literary Database, since Pinter was not Kurdish (as far as we know!). Instead, it is better categorised as literature about Kurds. Still, its significance for many Kurdish writers and readers stems from its geographical connection; Pinter’s visit to the site provides the play with its particular Kurdishness, which is inextricable from the text.  

The issue of labelling who is and is not Kurdish quickly becomes complicated. Ostensibly, literature’s universality allows many writers to resist the Kurdish literature label. But there could be other, unspoken reasons to be careful around labelling writers. While we are not worried about Yaşar Kemal rising from his grave to strangle us for including him in the database, attaching that label to living writers might unintentionally put them at risk simply for being listed. Kemal Varol is another example of a writer who chooses not to publicly emphasise his Kurdish background. Varol’s Wûf (2020) stands out as a fiercely innovative novel deserving much greater recognition. The narrative unfolds through a canine whose life is profoundly affected by the conflict between Turkey’s Northerners and Southerners. Varol has emphasised that he approached writing the novel ‘through a literary lens first and foremost’, deliberately stepping back from declaring who is right or wrong, and even from naming the specific groups involved. This approach certainly opens the door for readers to explore the novel’s broader themes: the nature of conflict, love, grief, and the toll that war takes on places, people, and animals. However, the novel’s power arguably lies in its parallels to the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. This specific reading transforms the text into a haunting depiction of a totalitarian reality, much like Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). For a reader to detach Wûf entirely from its real-world counterpart feels like diminishing its impact. The undeniable political specificity fuels the literary tension. It creates a powerful dialogue between the text and the historical context, influencing how we read it. Still, Varol chose not to explicitly name a conveniently tidy political allegory. He also avoided addressing the political interpretation of his novel in interviews or official statements. Finding details about Varol’s Kurdish background was additionally surprisingly difficult. He is from Diyarbakır, widely considered the de facto capital of Kurdistan and intended as such under the failed Treaty of Sèvres. His author biography does not mention his Kurdish heritage despite the fact that he has noted briefly in interviews how his parents sang Kurdish stories in the tradition of the traditional singing storytellers known as dengbêjs. 

We would be remiss not to elaborate on the difficulty of archiving dengbêj performances. While influential Kurdish playwrights such as Zeynep Esmeray identify themselves as dengbêjs, little effort has been made to categorise this oral tradition as literature, largely because its changing nature complicates preservation through translation and publication. As with the Arabic storytelling tradition of al-Hakawati, fixing an authoritative text to this practice would undermine the form’s essential improvisational element, in which story events shift for a variety of reasons: audience reaction, the narrator’s gender or age, idiosyncratic inclination, and more. Accordingly, no single consensus exists on how these oral traditions should be transcribed. The fluid nature of dengbêj storytelling influences Esmeray’s play, Cadının Bohçası, which changes with every performance as she interacts with the audience in the moment. After over a decade of performing improvised and adapted versions of the play from memory, Esmeray eventually published it in written form in Turkish in 2013, and it will be published in English translation in 2027.ⁱ  However, the English translation is only a translation of one of countless versions of the play, and the Kurdish Literary Database can never capture the full breadth of all the different stories Esmeray tells in person each time she is on stage. In a recent interview with The Markaz Review, she stated: ‘Writing things down for history is important, but there is also this other thing: oral memory carrying’.  

Many Kurdish stories have been passed through generations in a way that prioritises the spoken word over written texts. However, recently, Kurdish dengbêjs have turned to new forms of media to record versions of some of these stories in English. Examples of traditional Kurdish tales recorded by contemporary storytellers can be found online on various social media platforms. For instance, Homeira Soufi presents traditional stories, including The Tale of Shamaran (2024) and Heso and Nazê (2024), on YouTube and TikTok. Recordings like these resist simple categorisation within the Kurdish Literary Database, not only due to the use of non-traditional media, but also because of the complicated questions raised about the authorship of traditional tales, which have been told and retold over generations. However, despite the challenges, we hope to include more examples of oral storytelling within the database over time because it is an important aspect of Kurdish literature and one of the ways that so many stories have survived generations of censorship. 

... continued efforts of many Kurds to write in a banned language and to imagine a future Kurdistan posits a simple question: When has resistance ever been a zero-sum game?

In a recent interview, the author Jan Dost described Kurdish literature as ‘a shadow literature’. Growing up in Syria under the Baʿath regime, where Kurdish was banned in education and public life, Dost resisted the authorities by choosing to write in Kurdish. However, he has also published novels in Arabic. He describes himself as feeling ‘like a piece of iron caught between two magnets’, as he experiences a pull of attraction from both languages — one sanctioned and one forbidden. His description of Kurdish literature as a shadow literature that often has to remain hidden is a reminder of the archive’s important role in recording some of these shadowy spaces that might otherwise disappear. Erasure or disappearance is always a risk for any text, especially for those published online. While researching for the database, we found some texts that had been removed from journal websites since their publication, for instance. As well as recording information about texts, our work on the database involves ensuring that there is an archive digital copy of all the websites where Kurdish texts have been published in English to protect against future loss. 

Kurdish writers have developed strategies of self-protection. It may be that for writers such as Varol, living in nations where Kurdish rights continue to be denied, a sense of ethnic ambiguity is an intentional choice — perhaps as a way to avoid the severe persecution faced by other openly Kurdish figures like Şimşek. Developing a Kurdish literary database for living writers could potentially put them at considerable risk. However, the continued efforts of many Kurds to write in a banned language and to imagine a future Kurdistan posits a simple question: When has resistance ever been a zero-sum game? At its core, our mission with this database is to provide a lineage of Kurdish literature in English to readers who may never have encountered it before – many of whom may be Kurds themselves – precisely because of the ongoing campaign of linguicide and genocide waged against Kurdish language and culture. Without a documented culture, the forced erasure of an identity becomes easier to justify and less insidious in the eyes of the global public. 

Archival work can be motivated by purely intrinsic factors, but it is undeniably a political stance. Governments dread a revolution in which their own people demand recognition of their rights to claim their land and language as their own. We hope to inspire more literary databases dedicated to marginalised languages, and to encourage others to read, translate, and write the works of their own people without fear of censorship or persecution. 

Endnotes

ⁱ Cadının Bohçası [The Witch’s Bundle] will be published in English translation in Henar Press’s forthcoming collection: Who’s Afraid of Kurdistan? An Anthology of Contemporary Plays (2027).

Works Cited 

Ali. ‘Memory as Resistance: An Interview with Zeynep Esmeray.’ The Markaz Review, 3 July 2026, themarkaz.org/memory-as-resistance-an-interview-with-zeynep-esmeray/. 

Frostick, Luke. ‘Kemal Varol Interview.’ The Bosphorus Review of Books, bosphorusreview.com/kemal-varol-interview. 

Qualey, Marcia Lynx. ‘Jan Dost on writing in Arabic and Kurdish: “Like being caught between two magnets.”’ Qantara, 1 April 2025, qantara.de/en/article/jan-dost-writing-arabic-and-kurdish-being-caught-between-two-magnets.  

Sönmez, Burhan. ‘European Literature Festival 2016: The Writers’ Showcase – Burhan Sönmez (Turkey).’ YouTube, uploaded by Czech Centre London, 6 July 2016, youtu.be/f2RWlEh-3H8. 

Zalewski, Piotr. ‘His Own Çukurova.’ The Nation, 29 Apr. 2015, thenation.com/article/archive/his-own-cukurova/.  

Cover image: Ion Pacea, 'Still Life with Pomegranates'