Book cover for Dictionary of Midnight by Abdulla Pashew

Dictionary of Midnight

2019 Released
2-3 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Phoneme MediaISBN 9781646050222
Translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

With a foreword by National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann

Dictionary of Midnight collects almost 50 years of poetry by Abdulla Pashew, the most influential Kurdish poet alive today. Pashew's poems chart a personal cartography of exile, recounting the recent political history of Kurdistan and its struggle for independence. Poet-translator Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse worked with the poet to select and translate his most iconic poems, balancing well-known, politically engaged contemporary Kurdish classics like "12 Lessons for Children" with the concise love lyrics that have always punctuated his work.

Abdulla Pashew

When he gives readings in Kurdistan, Abdulla Pashew draws audiences in the thousands. In addition to his eight volumes of poetry, Pashew is a prolific translator, fluent in Russian and English, responsible for bringing Whitman and Pushkin to Kurdish readership. He holds a master's degree in pedagogy and a doctorate in philology. DICTIONARY OF MIDNIGHT is the first book-length selection of his poetry to appear in English.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

Translated by

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth-century poetry, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as an MEd from the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), Nali’s My Moon Is the Only Moon (2021) and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2024). She was a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature.

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