Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer until, facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her first book in English, the poetry collection The War Works Hard (2005), won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award. It was also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and was named one of the twenty-five books to remember by the New York Public Library in 2005. Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (2009) won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and published her first work of literary non-fiction, The Beekeeper of Sinjar, to great acclaim. Her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2021. In 2024, her fifth collection of poems, Tablets: The Secrets of the Clay, will be published by New Directions (US) and Carcanet (UK). She currently lives in Michigan and works as an Arabic instructor for Oakland University.

Twitter: @dunyamikhail

Website: dunyamikhailpoet.com

Photo credit (c) Michael Smith

‘A striking act of imagination that recasts her earlier research with new emotional power.’ – Ron Charles, Washington Post

‘Frank and wrenching…Mikhail’s sympathetic and fast-moving story of ordinary life and its violent disruption makes for a moving love letter to the Yazidi.’ – Publishers Weekly

 ‘I wanted to freeze time and stay there forever, in that peaceful spot on the mountain, far away from all the noise and violence of the rest of the world, where the biggest problem was Elias accidentally blowing the fire whistle.’ – M Lynx Qualey, Arablit Quarterly