Bakhtiyar Ali, Kurdish author and novelist, was awarded the German Hilde-Domin-Prize for 2023, yesterday in Germany. The prize is specific to writers who live in exile and write and publish literary works in Germany. The prize is provided by the Hilde-Domin organisation and awarded to a literary author every three years.

After receiving the Nelly Sachs prize in 2017, this is the second notable prize which the author Bakhtiyar Ali receives. The prize is in the name of Hilde Domin who is considered the mother of German prose poems and one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century of Germany. Hilde Domin herself has been the first winner of the prize in 1992.

Bakhtiyar Ali was born in 1960 in Slemani. He is a Kurdish novelist, poet, and intellectual. He has left Kurdistan and headed toward Europe in 1994. He has published his first novel, “The Death of the Second Only Child”, in 1997.

From Slemani UNESCO Creative City of Literature Office; we offer our congratulations, appreciation, and support to the esteemed, dear, and talented author of our city, country and humanity; Bakhtiyar Ali, who has been successfully and deservingly awarded the Hilde-Domin-Prize in Heidelberg, Germany, which is a Creative City of UNESCO counterpart to Slemani in Germany. As always; we wish him unceasing high-ranking positions of literary creativity.