Dunya Mikhail was born in 1965 and educated at Baghdad University. She worked as Literary Editor for The Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing harassment from the authorities for her writings, Mikhail left her native Iraq in the 1990s, travelling first to Jordan, and then the US, where she studied Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. She speaks and writes in Arabic, Aramaic and English. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She has published four collections in Arabic, and one lyrical, multi-genre text, The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea.
'Here is the new Iraqi poetry: terse, unadorned, stripped and ironic...her voice is the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today.'
Pierre Joris
'Everything about this is celebration and welcome: context, vision, information, critical perspective...'
Kamau Brathwaite
'Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon. Blunt as well as subtle, she makes of war a distinct entity, thus turning it into a myth. To her own question: 'What does it mean to die all this death?', her poems answer that it means to reveal the only redeeming power that we have: the existence of love.'
Etel Adnan
Awards won by Dunya Mikhail
Short-listed, 2005 Griffin International Poetry Prize
(The War Works Hard)
Winner, 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award
(The War Works Hard)
