Losing hope means ceasing to love my son and my girlfriend and many friends and people around the world. We in Iraq have not descended from another p….

In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and ….

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality..

The people in Arab countries are now speaking out and asking many questions about human rights, minorities, religion, democracy, "the other," and so ….

The Arab world is full of corruption, in the time of the dictatorships and in the time of anarchy. This corruption is not only in politics and the ec….

I'm not much interested in prizes, whether from the Arab world or from the Western world. Writing is a very difficult process and I want to continue ….

I've been working on the margins and I was aware of this choice from the start. I buy most of what's written and produced in the Arab world and I don….

Losing hope means ceasing to love my son and my girlfriend and many friends and people around the world..

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand..

It's true that we in Iraq are now paying a heavy price as a consequence of senseless violence, but nonetheless there are many positive things happeni….

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arab….

I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in….

In art class at school we learned how to draw tanks and soldiers opening fire at [Iranian leader Ayatollah] Khomeini and his beard. They didn't teach….

I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other wo….

For seven years I wrote and published my texts on the Internet and no Arab festival invited me and no Arab publishing house wanted to publish my book….

When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and new….

"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience..

The trail of "secret migration" was a shock to me. I knew a little about the difficulties, just bits of news in the media..

While I was studying film at the Academy, the problems started. I wasn't a political activist directly in the time of Saddam [Hussein], because the d….

Some Iraqi writers are more daring today and have excellent imaginations and their material is rich in human experience. But the Arab prizes, once ag….

There's no violence worse than the violence of Iraq. For the last fifty years Iraq has been living a nightmare of violence and terror. It's been a ho….