Ali Albazzaz 

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BIOGRAPHY

Ali Albazzaz was born in Iraq in 1958. He studied at the Institute for Economic and Administrative Education in Iraq. He fled to The Netherlands in 1997, after it was made public that Saddam Hussein’s police was out looking for him, because of his poems about the Iraqi-Iranian war. In The Netherlands he soon mastered the Dutch language and started publishing Dutch-language poems in various magazines.

In 1999 Albazzaz won the First Literary Prize of the El Hizjra Foundation in Amsterdam. From November 2001 till February 2002 he took part in the Dunya Literair Traject (Literary Course), under supervision of Remco Ekkers, Jana Beranová and Henry Habibe. He made his debut with a volume entitled Een kaars verduistert toch de zon (A candle will block out the sun anyway), a publication by Werkgroep PAL (study group) in Hollandscheveld, in the province of Drenthe.

Some of his new poems have been included in the anthology Een hand uit de nacht (A hand from the night), published by the Dunya foundation, May 2002.

In June 2002 writers, poets, journalists, literary organisations and publishers from all over the country filed a petition for a residence permit for Albazzaz at Zwolle’s Royal Court of Justice and the Dutch Immigration Agency (IND), to prevent his impending extradition. This petition was signed, amongst others, by J. Bernlef (writer and chairman of PEN Emergency Fund), Stichting Dunya, Poetry International, Stichting El Hizjra (centre for Arabic art and culture), AIDA Nederland and Dutch Poet Laureate, Gerrit Komrij.

In November 2003 his book De ober van mijn dromen (The waiter of my dreams) was published by Bèta Imaginations.

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