Hassan Blasim

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi writer, poet, and filmmaker resettled in Helsinki, Finland. Born in Baghdad, he studied at the city’s Academy of Cinematic Arts where his films Gardenia (screenplay and director) and White Clay (screenplay) won the Academy’s Festival Award for Best Work. In 1998 his tutors advised him to leave Baghdad, after his work attracted attention from Saddam Hussein’s informants at the academy. In 1998, he left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, where he continued to make films. He directed the feature-length Wounded Camera under the pseudonym Ouazad Osman, because he feared for the safety of his family still living in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship. After fleeing and traveling through Europe as a refugee, he settled in Finland in 2004, where he continues to make films. His debut collection of short stories, The Madman of Freedom Square, translated by Jonathan Wright and published by Comma Press, in 2009, was long-listed for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His second collection, The Iraqi Christ, also translated by Wright and published by Comma Press in 2013, won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. A selection of stories from both collections, The Corpse Exhibition, was published, in the U.S., by Penguin in 2014. Blasim’s first play The Digital Hats Game was performed in Helsinki, in 2016. His writing has been translated into over 20 languages. The Guardian newspaper described him as “perhaps the greatest writer of Arab fiction alive.” In 2020, his debut novel, God 99 was translated by Wright and published by Comma Press.