I AM GOING TO KILL SOMEBODY | Firat Ceweri and Jeannette Okur in conversation

About this event

Deep Vellum hosts a conversation with Firat Ceweri on the occasion of his new book, I Am Going to Kill Somebody (Henar Press), translated from the Kurdish by Jeannette Okur. Join us for a bilingual reading and exciting discussion between Ceweri and Okur. Temo is forty-two, fresh out of prison, and living with his dying mother. When he wakes up one morning to a voice telling him he's going to kill somebody, he slips a kitchen knife into his pocket and wanders through the unnamed capital of Kurdistan. After fifteen years of torture and a lifetime of having his fate handed to him, he plans to choose his own victim and silence the voice. But he isn't the only one looking for an escape. Across the city, Diana sits with her pimp in a café waiting for a client who could be her ticket out. A writer from Europe arrives to give a reading of his new book in Kurdish, his first time doing so, already questioning why he ever returned. As their paths converge over the course of a single day, their lives are changed in ways they never could have anticipated. From the celebrated Kurdish translator of Dostoevsky, I Am Going to Kill Somebody is a subversive literary thriller on the absurdity of being Kurdish in an adversarial world. Firat Cewerî (b. 1959, Dêrik, Mêrdîn) is a Kurdish writer and translator who has profoundly shaped modern Kurdish literature. Exiled from Turkey to Sweden in 1980, he published his first book that same year and has since produced forty works: twenty original books and twenty translations into Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish). His translations range from Dostoevsky and Steinbeck to Swedish masters including Hjalmar Söderberg, Tomas Tranströmer, and Astrid Lindgren. In 1992, Ceweri founded the influential literary journal Nûdem (New Time), which he published for a decade to develop Kurdish literature and support emerging writers. He later established Nûdem Werger (New Time Translation) to bring world literature into Kurdish. His novels and stories have been…

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