Migration was not the only unpleasant experience I went though. I was born and lived in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose wars never ended, and from an early age I was passionate about understanding the world through knowledge.

Whenever we went out to film in the street we would end up in the police station and in the offices of some other security agency. They deliberately intimidated us. I moved to Kurdistan and changed my name and made my first feature film in Kurdistan with very basic resources.

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

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.

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.

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.