Location: London / Sulaymaniyah (Iraq)
Choman Hardi
Choman Hardi is the author of critically-acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. She is an educator, poet, and scholar whose work is informed by an intersectional approach to inequality, renowned for her pioneering work on issues of gender and education.
Choman returned home after twenty-six years of displacement, to teach English and initiate gender studies at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani (AUIS). She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) there. Under her leadership, CGDS initiated the first interdisciplinary gender studies minor in Iraq, and is developing gender studies resources in Kurdish and Arabic, funded by the European Union. She is a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, on which she is researching about the role of institutions and practices on the construction of masculinity.
Since 2010, poems from Choman’s first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of the English GCSE curriculum in the UK. Choman’s second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society, and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also translated into French in 2020. A selection of Choman’s poems was published in Italian in 2017.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Choman’s post-doctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Routledge, 2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Her translation of Sherko Bekas’s Butterfly Valley (ARC Publishing) won a PEN Translates Award.
Publications & Prizes:
-Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004).
-Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015).
-Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Routledge, 2011).
-Forward Prize for Best Collection: Shortlisted.
-PEN Translates Award: Award Winner.
