Die Herrin der Vögel

Literary expeditions
Reading and discussion with Bakhtyar Ali, moderated by Ilija Trojanow

Bakhtyar Ali has been living and writing in Germany for decades, always about Kurdistan. From exile, he keeps this torn country alive in literature with his own mixture of fairy tales and politics, enchantment and violence. A conversation about the need to poeticize brutal reality and expose the lies of domination - with one of the great storytellers of our time. Bakhtyar Ali talks to Ilija Trojanov about his novel "The Lady of the Birds", translated from the Kurdish (Sorani) by Ute Cantera-Lang and Rawezh Salim. Due to her health restrictions, young Sausan spends a lot of time in her father's library, where she discovers the abundance and richness of the world through books. She is certain that if she ever marries, it will be to a man with a cosmopolitan mind and a love of stories. When three suitors ask her to marry them, she sets them the task of traveling the world for eight years and bringing her back one hundred birds. She will use their reports to see if she sees the riches of the world in them. Bakhtyar Ali was born in 1966 in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. He has lived in Germany since the mid-1990s.

With the kind support of the CHRYSANTIL Foundation