For seven years I wrote and published my texts on the Internet and no Arab festival invited me and no Arab publishing house wanted to publish my books, and I wasn't known in the Western world because of my political positions.

Some Iraqi writers are more daring today and have excellent imaginations and their material is rich in human experience. But the Arab prizes, once again, are part of the context of life in the Arab world - anarchy, confusion, and corruption.

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world.

Losing hope means ceasing to love my son and my girlfriend and many friends and people around the world.

In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and the violence of society.

There's no violence worse than the violence of Iraq. For the last fifty years Iraq has been living a nightmare of violence and terror. It's been a horrible experience and people in Iraq will need a lot of time and work to get over the disastrous effects. But first we have to think about how to stop the violence, so that the bloodshed stops. In spite of everything, on the personal level I don't easily lose hope.