Hassan Blasim

Who is Hassan Blasim?

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi-born film director and writer who lives in Finland. He writes in Arabic.

Blasim went to Finland as a refugee in 2004 after getting in trouble when making the film The Wounded Camera in the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. He made four short films for the Finnish broadcasting company Yle. His short story collection The Madman of Freedom Square was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His book The Iraqi Christ, translated from Arabic to English by Jonathan Wright, and published by Comma Press in 2013. A selection of his stories was published as The Corpse Exhibition by Penguin US in 2014. It won a number of awards including one of four winners in the English Pen's Writers in Translation Programme Awards. In 2014, he became the first ever Arabic writer to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.