Uc Berkeley Dutch Studies Program

The author of this book was born in 1954 in Iran. As a university student, he joined an underground movement that first rebelled against the Shah and later against Khomeini. For his clandestine publications, he adopted the alias Kader Abdolah in honor of two of his comrades in the underground who were assassinated by Iran’s successive regimes of oppression. In 1988, he reached the Netherlands where he received political asylum. Little by little, he began to master the Dutch language. Abdolah’s literary career in Dutch began in 1993. His debut was an astonishing success and paved the way for a career that would lead him to the top of contemporary Dutch literature. In addition to his work as a novelist, he became a weekly columnist. Fifty of his columns appear here. Kader Abdolah is widely seen as one the most original and thought-provoking voices in the debate on the profound transformations that are taking place in Europe in consequence of the immigration in the last decades.