The Madman of Freedom Square
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From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience.
Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers’ expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence.
Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.
'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...'
– The Guardian, 12 Jun 10.
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Hassan Blasim is a poet, film-maker and short story writer. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city's Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films ‘Gardenia’ (screenplay) and ‘White Clay’ (screenplay & director) won the Academy's Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years. In 1998 he left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the pseudonym Ouazad Osman, fearing for his family back in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship. In 2004, he moved to Finland, where he has since made numerous short films and documentaries for Finnish television. His stories have previously been published on www.iraqstory.com and his essays on cinema have featured in Cinema Booklets (Emirates Cultural Foundation). After first appearing in English in Madinah, his debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was published by Comma a year later (Nov 09).
Madman was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010, and is currently being translated into Finnish and Italian. Hassan was recently described by The Guardian newspaper as 'perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive'.
