Hassan Blasim

Originally from Baghdad, Hassan Blasim is a writer and filmmaker who now lives in Finland. He joined Reel Iraq in 2013 in Edinburgh to read from his collection of short stories, ‘The Iraqi Christ’.

Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city’s Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films ‘Gardenia’ (screenplay) and ‘White Clay’ (screenplay & director) won the Academy’s Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years.

Hassan Blasim

In 1998 Hassan left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan) where he made the feature-length drama Wounded Camera under the pseudonym Ouazad Osmanfearing (for fear of his family back in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship). In 2004, he moved to Finland, where he has since made numerous short films and documentaries for Finnish television. His stories have previously been published on www.iraqstory.com (Arabic link) and his essays on cinema have featured in Cinema Booklets (Emirates Cultural Foundation).

After first appearing in English, his debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright and published by Comma Publishing a year later (2009). Madman was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010, and has since been translated into five languages. A heavily edited version of the book was finally published in Arabic in 2012, and was immediately banned in many Arab countries. His second collection The Iraqi Christ was published in 2013. He has won the English PEN Writers in Translation award twice, and was recently described by The Guardian as perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive’.

In 2013, Hassan Blasim visited Edinburgh and Reel Festivals reading excerpts from his book ‘The Iraqi Christ’ and taking part in a Q & A session. ‘The Iraqi Christ’ is published through Comma Press.

You can read an interview with of Hassan Blasim on Guernica Mag.