Hassan Blasim takes Independent prize with The Iraqi Christ, a collection of short stories portraying Iraq as a 'surrealist inferno'
Short stories about the refugee experience … Hassan Blasim, winner of the 2014 Independent foreign fiction prize. Photograph: Katja Bohm
Exiled Iraqi author Hassan Blasim's portrayal of his country as a "surrealist inferno" in his short story collection The Iraqi Christ has won the author the Independent foreign fiction prize.
Blasim, a poet, filmmaker and short story writer, is the first Arab writer to win the award in its 24-year history – and the only author ever to win the prize with a novel that is yet to be published in its original language due to censorship concerns. The Iraqi Christ is Blasim's second short story collection and is, said judge and Independent literary editor Boyd Tonkin, "a classic work of postwar witness, mourning and revolt". It beat titles including Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's hit A Man in Love, and Birgit Vanderbeke's classic German debut The Mussel Feast, to take the £10,000 prize, which is shared equally with Blasim's translator Jonathan Wright.
The 14 stories of The Iraqi Christ give a glimpse – "unforgettable and often harrowing", said the Independent award – into modern Iraq, and are written as a mix of reportage, memoir and dark fantasy in settings from the desert to the forest.
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Blasim, a poet, filmmaker and short story writer, is the first Arab writer to win the award in its 24-year history – and the only author ever to win the prize with a novel that is yet to be published in its original language due to censorship concerns. The Iraqi Christ is Blasim's second short story collection and is, said judge and Independent literary editor Boyd Tonkin, "a classic work of postwar witness, mourning and revolt". It beat titles including Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's hit A Man in Love, and Birgit Vanderbeke's classic German debut The Mussel Feast, to take the £10,000 prize, which is shared equally with Blasim's translator Jonathan Wright.
The 14 stories of The Iraqi Christ give a glimpse – "unforgettable and often harrowing", said the Independent award – into modern Iraq, and are written as a mix of reportage, memoir and dark fantasy in settings from the desert to the forest.
More
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