An event with The Queen’s College Translation Exchange
The Queen’s Translation Exchange is delighted to welcome Choman Hardi (PPP, 1996) back to The Queen’s College to present her novel Whispering Walls (Afsana Press, 2023), and discuss the broader themes of translation and negotiation between languages, styles and values.
Writing in both Kurdish and English, author of prose and poetry, translation is intrinsic to Hardi’s practice, never more so than in her debut novel. In Whispering Walls, three siblings, two in London and one in Iraqi Kurdistan, put their intimacy to the test as the US invasion of Iraq looms large.
Founder of the Center of Gender Development Studies at the American University of Iraq, Choman Hardi initiated Iraq’s first Gender Studies minor.
Join us for a unique evening to explore a career and a novel at the crossroads of social sciences, literature and politics. Choman will discuss her personal journey, from her arrival in the UK to her return to Iraqi-Kurdistan as a gender studies scholar, and on her approach to poetry and prose, before a reading from Whispering Walls, a discussion and Q&A moderated by Dr Heba El-Shazli (Academic Visitor, St Antony’s College), followed by a book signing and refreshments.Â
Choman Hardi is an educator, author, and gender studies pioneer in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies which initiated the first gender studies minor in Iraq. She is the author of critically acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, her post-doctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Routledge, 2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Since 2010,  poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of their general curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2017, a selection of her poems was published in Italian. In 2020, Considering the Woman was released in a French translation. Her translation of Sherko Bekas’s Butterfly Valley (ARC Publishing) won a PEN Translates Award and she is a recipient of the 2023 Franco-German Human Rights Prize. Whispering Walls, her debut novel, was published in 2023.
Heba F. El-Shazli is an Egyptian American and an avid lover and reader of literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She is an associate professor of political science at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Currently, a visiting academic at St Antony’s College for the 2023-24 year. She has been teaching classes at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC (USA) since 2013 using translated literature to help better understand the MENA region.
