Theory of Absence

Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi-American poet, was born in Baghdad in 1965 and left Iraq to Michigan, USA in the mid-1990s. She has worked as a journalist for The Baghdad Observer and her work was found “subversive.” She was awarded the United Nations 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 twenty-five books to remember in 2005 by the New York Public Library. It was also translated into Italian by Elena Chiti and published by Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani (2011). Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions, 2009) won the 2010 Arab American Book Award. Her new poetry book The Iraqi Nights is coming from New Directions in 2014