The prominent Kurdish poet and writer, Abdulla Pashew, is widely regarded as the most popular living Kurdish poet.
Born in 1946 in Hawler, the capital city of southern Kurdistan, Abdulla Pashew attended the Teachers’ Training Institute in Hawler before travelling to the former Soviet Union where he obtained an M.A. in Pedagogy, specialising in foreign languages. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philology from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1984. Afterwards, he worked as a professor at Al-Fatih University, Tripoli Libya.
Abdulla Pashew’s first poem was published in 1963 and his first collection in 1967, since when he’s published seven more collections. His most recent publication was his two-volume Collected Poems: Baraw Zardapar (Towards Twilight) published in Sweden 2001 and Hespim Hewrew Rikefim Chiya (My Horse is a Cloud, My Stirrup a Mountain).
Pashew has also translated the works of Walt Whitman and Alexander Pushkin into Kurdish. Most recent translations are by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse. He has lived in Finland since 1995.
