Potato Eaters

Farhad Pirbal (born 1961) is an iconic Kurdish writer, poet, painter, critic, singer, and scholar, who has lived in Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Germany, Denmark, and France, where he obtained his Ph.D. in History of Contemporary Kurdish Literature at the Sorbonne. Publishing since 1979, Pirbal has authored more than seventy books of writing and translation and serves as one of Kurdistan’s farthest-reaching voices. In 1994, he founded the Sharafkhan Bidlisi Cultural Center in Hawler. In 2024, marking his English-language debut, Deep Vellum will publish his collected poems, Refugee Number 33,333, and his debut short story collection, The Potato Eaters.Jiyar Homer is a translator and editor from Kurdistan, a member of Kashkul, the Center for Arts and Culture at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), and an editor at Îlyan magazine and the Balinde Poetry publishing house. He speaks Kurdish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Per-sian. He specializes in translating Latin American literature into Kurdish and Kurdish literature into various languages, bringing over one hundred authors into publication in more than thirty countries. His book-length translations include works by Juan Carlos Onetti, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Farhad Pirbal, and Sherzad Hassan. Additionally, he is a member of Kurdish PEN.Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and professor. She holds a Ph.D. in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), and Something Missing From This World: An Anthology of Contemporary Êzîdî Poetry (2024). Her writing has appeared in Modern Poetry in Trans-lation, World Literature Today, Plume, Epiphany, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and Slemani’s UNESCO City of Literature. She is a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish.

"These are writings of soulful absurdity that at times verge into performance art... These stories speak up to power, but they do it while laughing down their sleeves." —Wall Street Journal"The bitter ironies cast against the rich, anxious longing of the protagonists make Pirbal’s short stories expressions of genius, evoking those same pained emotions, leaving the readers heartbroken and thoughtful in all the right ways." —Chicago Review of Books"Though conventional in their seemingly autobiographical origins, these early stories already showcase Pirbal’s poetic tendencies — beautifully revealed throughout Homer and Levinson-LaBrosse’s skillful translation." —The Markaz Review