I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in complete isolation.

The Iran-Iraq war began the same year that I went to primary school, at the age of six.

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

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.

I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in complete isolation.

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience.