The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the sectarian war that followed, and the displacement of millions of Iraqis have produced a body of fiction unlike anything else in contemporary Arabic letters. The major writers are now mostly outside Iraq — in Helsinki, Paris, Chicago, London — but writing back to Baghdad.
01
Frankenstein in Baghdad
IPAF 2014, International Booker shortlist 2018. A junk-dealer sews together a body from the streets.
02
The Corpse Washer
A young Baghdadi inherits his father's ritual washing of Shi'a dead. Quiet, devastating.
03
The Book of Collateral Damage
An Iraqi academic in New York obsessively cataloguing every loss of the war.
05
The Iraqi Christ
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014. Surreal, brittle short stories from the diaspora.
06
Saddam City
Prison and Mosul under the Ba'th, by a survivor of multiple Iraqi prisons.