Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi-American poet, was born in Baghdad in 1965 and left Iraq to the US (Michigan) in mid 1990s. She has worked as a journalist for “The Baghdad Observer” and her work was found “subversive.” She was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing in 2001, and her translator, Elizabeth Winslow, won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award. Her first book in English, The War Works Hard (New Directions 2005, Carcanet 2006) was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and was named one of the 25 books to remember in 2005 by the New York Public Library. It was also translated into Italian by Elena Chiti. Mikhail’s Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions, NY, 2009) won the 2010 Arab American Book Award. Her new book “The Iraqi Nights” is translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and is out from New Directions (2014).