The Modern Kurdish Short Story

The Modern Kurdish Short Story

Farhad Shakely

Uppsala Universitet

The focus of this study is on the Kurdish' short story, read from the viewpoint of literary history. The political course of events in Kurdistan, and the political and social circumstances which followed, have without question strongly influenced the Kurdish short story both in content, style, and language. The Kurdish short story has its origins in the second decade of the twentieth century. Kurdish prose arose in the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are few examples of Kurdish prose from that time; in every case, they are non-literary.
Kurdish journalism played a central role in the development of the short story. The origin of the art of the Kurdish short story is directly related to Kurdish journalism. This development cannot be isolated from very conscious attempts to further the Kurdish shftrt story with the help of translations of short stories into Kurdish from other languages - European languages in particular.
This essay is an attempt to study the development of the Kurdish short story from its start until the beginning of the first decade in the 21st century.