Golan Haji

Golan Haji has taken part in many Highlight Arts events, including Reel Festivals 2011, where he participated in the poetry translation workshops and the festival in LebanonĀ and in the UK.

Golan is a Syrian poet and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He was born in Amouda, a Kurdish town in the north of Syria. He has worked as a translator from English and American literature, and has translated Robert Louis Stevenson’s Scottish classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into Arabic (2008), in addition to Dark Harbor , selected poems of Mark Strand (2002), Rear Window, scenario of Alfred Hitchcock‘s movie (2005), Elephant by Dan Wylie (2010), Notebooks of Anton Chekhov (2011).

His first collection of poetry in Arabic, Called in Darkness (2004), won the Al-Maghut prize in poetry. His second book of poetry, Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), was published during the event celebrating Damascus as the Capital of culture in 2008. His next collection Autumn Here is Magical and Vast, in both Arabic and Italian,was published in Rome 2013. He lived in Damascus until he had to flee his country and has now settled in France.

You can read some of Golan’s work at Words Without Borders, Wolf Magazine, and on Jadaliyya.