Birds in a Gale

A kaleidoscopic novel of politics, identity, and dislocation in the wake of the Islamic Revolution.
Some years after the overthrow of the Shah, Mehraban has returned to Iran after a period of wandering and exile to write the story of a famed Kurdish revolutionary named Farhad. Guided by our unnamed narrator, Mehraban pursues his story and its mysterious living-dead subject, learning that he and Farhad share bittersweet memories of lost love amid fractured historical nightmares. Trapped in consciousness, trapped by mortality, trapped in a world that is not and cannot be comprehended, Birds in a Gale turns in on itself, entangling Mehraban’s and Farhad’s once-separate identities irrevocably before rejecting the objective altogether.
Originally published in 2002, Birds in a Gale is a poignant, psychological, and deeply political effort by one of Kurdistan’s best-loved writers to restore the Kurds to their rightful place in the history of the revolution. This inventive metatext, lucidly translated by Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo, is reminiscent of the best of George Saunders and Elias Khoury, and an instant classic of twenty-first-century world literature.

Ata Nahai is a Kurdish novelist and short story writer who writes in Sorani Kurdish. His writing has been translated into Persian, Arabic, Kurmanji, and English. He has been awarded the Aras Prize for Kurdish literature and the Ahmad Hardi Prize for Creativity in Sulaymaniyah. The Persian translation of his last novel, Betting on Helaleh’s Life, won the best fiction prize of the year in Iran.
Chiya Parvizpur is a Kurdish writer and translator working in both Kurdish and English. His English work has been published by Transnational London Press, Whisper House Press, Henar Press, and Common Notions.
Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo is a multilingual writer, translator, and researcher with over two decades of teaching experience across language and literature. She is currently pursuing research on cultural hybridity in migration literature.