Birds in a Gale

A kaleidoscopic novel of politics, identity, and dislocation in the wake of the Islamic Revolution.

Some years after the overthrow of the Shah, Mehraban has returned to Iran after a period of wandering and exile to write the story of a famed Kurdish revolutionary named Farhad. Guided by our unnamed narrator, Mehraban pursues his story and its mysterious living-dead subject, learning that he and Farhad share bittersweet memories of lost love amid fractured historical nightmares. Trapped in consciousness, trapped by mortality, trapped in a world that is not and cannot be comprehended, Birds in a Gale turns in on itself, entangling Mehraban’s and Farhad’s once-separate identities irrevocably before rejecting the objective altogether.

Originally published in 2002, Birds in a Gale is a poignant, psychological, and deeply political effort by one of Kurdistan’s best-loved writers to restore the Kurds to their rightful place in the history of the revolution. This inventive metatext, lucidly translated by Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo, is reminiscent of the best of George Saunders and Elias Khoury, and an instant classic of twenty-first-century world literature.

Ata Nahaei is a Kurdish novelist and short story writer who writes in Sorani Kurdish. He is considered one of the foremost novelists in Greater Kurdistan (which includes parts of Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria) and the leading Kurdish novelist in Iran. Born in Baneh in 1960, he graduated from high school in 1978 with a diploma in literature. Due to the revolutionary atmosphere in Iran in 1979 and the subsequent closure of universities for the next four years, he was unable to continue his studies.

Nahaei began his literary career by writing short stories and producing essays on the art of fiction. He has published three collections of short stories and three novels in Kurdish and has translated several world short stories and literary essays into Kurdish. In 2002, he won the top vote at the First Conference on Teaching the Kurdish Language in Tehran and became the head of the Kurdish Language Academy in Iran.
In 2005, Nahaei was awarded the Aras Prize for Kurdish literature and received the Ahmad Hardi Prize for Creativity in Sulaymaniyah in 2008. Additionally, the Persian translation of his most recent novel won the Best Fiction Prize of the Year in Iran.

Nahaei has translated Houshang Golshiri’s Shazde Ehtejab and Milan Kundera’s The Kafkaesque World into Kurdish, along with several other short stories by well-known international authors.

Birds in a Gale was originally written in Sorani Kurdish and copublished by Zhiar Press in Sine and the Kurdish Cultural Institute of Tehran. The second edition was released in Southern Kurdistan (Iraq) by Aras Press. The third and fourth editions were published by Mang Press in Eastern Kurdistan. Additionally, the novel has been translated into Kurmanji and published by Avesta Press in Istanbul, and the Persian translation was published by Behnegar Press. Birds in Gale also won the Ahmad Hardi Prize for Creativity and the Aras Prize, with the latter awarded to Ata Nahaei at the Galawezh Festival of Kurdish Literature.