Sherko Bêkes

Sherko Bêkes (1940–2013), the greatest of contemporary Kurdish poets and pioneer of the new Kurdish 'image poetry'. He was born in Sulaymaniyah into a poetic family — his father was the poet Faiq Bêkes. He lived his childhood in the shadow of verse and wrote his first poems at seventeen. He joined the Kurdish cultural movement in the 1960s, a member of the New Kurdish Wave that overturned Kurdish poetry. He took part in the Kurdish revolution, lived for years in the mountains with the peshmerga, and was exiled to Sweden in 1987 after the Anfal campaign. In Stockholm he founded and led the Kurdish Cultural Centre. After 1991 he returned to Kurdistan and served as Minister of Culture for the Kurdistan Regional Government. He wrote more than thirty collections of poetry, translated into more than twenty languages. His poetry joins European modernity to a deep Kurdish heritage, and includes 'The Red Cockerel', which became a symbol of certain dark periods in Kurdistan. He received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize for freedom and the French Pierre Gamarra Prize. He died in Sweden of cancer in 2013, leaving instructions that his body should be cremated and his ashes scattered over Mount Goyîje near Sulaymaniyah — wishes that Islamic law forbade. He was buried in Azadi Park in Sulaymaniyah, where his grave has become 'the shrine of Kurdish poets'. His famous poem 'Kurdistan and the Poem' is today written on the walls of every Kurdish library: 'If you take the poem from me I shall die — and I shall only be buried in Kurdistan'.