Blasim fled Iraq in 1998, made his way overland through Iran, Turkey, and the Balkans, and finally claimed asylum in Finland in 2004. His short fiction — collected in The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013) — uses dark, brittle, often surreal short forms to do what straight realism cannot do with the war and its aftermath. The Iraqi Christ won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, the first time an Arabic-language collection had done so.
Recurring themes
the Iraqi refugee's overland route
war and the surreal
the short story as the right form
life in Helsinki and Baghdad at once
Selected works
- 2009The Madman of Freedom Square
- 2013The Iraqi Christ
- 2020God 99