Kawa Nemir

He was born in 1974 in Iğdir into an upper-class family[2] and attended schools for primary education both in Iğdir and Istanbul.[3] According to an interview published in Voice of America, he was faced with assimilation and denial of the Kurdish nation in school.[4] After he studied English language and literature at the Universities Hacettepe and Istanbul he also studied Ancient Greek at the University of Istanbul until 2002.[1] He did not like several of his friends join the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which fight against the Turkish Army but chose to become a writer.[4] In the early 2000s he moved to Diyarbakır.[2]

Since 1997 Nemir was the editor-in-chief of a prominent cultural and literary magazine in the Kurdish language, the Jiyana Rewşen.[3] Under his lead, the magazine published fifty-two issues on a monthly basis until 2003.[3] In 2012, his translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet premiered in the RAST theatre of Amsterdam, Netherlands.[3] It was the first Kurdish adaption of Hamlet.[5] and was later staged on several locations and occasions by the Municipally City Theatre of Diyarbakir.[2] In 2019, his translation of Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca premiered in the Amsterdam City theatre.[6] Besides having translated many classics of Greek and Roman literature into the Kurdish language, he is also playwright and has adapted the Kurdish classic Mem u Zin by Ehmedê Xhanî for theatre.[6]

• 2010 Feqî Huseyîn Sagniç award by the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul.[7]
• 2018 Resident in the former home of Anne Frank by the Dutch Foundation of Literature[2][8]