Choman Hardi

Choman Hardi (born 1974) is a contemporary Kurdish poet, translator and painter.

Background

She was born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan, the daughter of poet Ahmad Hardi. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign. She arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London. She did her PhD at University of Kent focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran. She has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish. Her only collection of English poems titled Life for Us was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004. Her articles have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation

Career

She has been a former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! and has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. She was a resident poet for 10 months at the Moniack Mhor or Scotland's National Writing Centre in 2004. She is a recipient of a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet's Apprenticeship. In June 2007, an exhibition of her paintings at the Hawth Arts Centre in Sussex County. In 2014, Dr. Hardi was appointed at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani as a lecturer in the department of English and Journalism.