Poetry Translation Centre

Choman Hardi

Born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Choman Hardi is is a poet, translator and painter. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign.

Choman arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London. She did her PhD at the University of Kent, focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran.

Choman has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish. Her first collection of English poems, Life for Us, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.

A former chairperson of Exiled Writers Ink! she has organized creative writing workshops for the British Council in UK, Belgium, Czech Republic and India. Choman was the poet in residence at Moniack Mhor, Scotland's National Writing Centre, in 2004. She was awarded a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet's Apprenticeship. In June 2007, an exhibition of her paintings was held at the Hawth Arts Centre in Sussex County. 

Choman is currently carrying out post-doctoral research at the Programme for Genocide and Holocaust Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden.

With Mimi Khalvati, she is currently co-translating the Kurdish poet, Kajal Ahmed, for the PTC's forthcoming World Poets' Tour II.