In conversation with Stefan Jonsson regarding Irakisk Kristus.

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi film director and writer working primarily in Arabic. Since 2004 he has resided in Finland, where he arrived as a refugee. His first collection of short stories The Madman of Freedom Square was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012, and was immediately forbidden in several Arabic countries when a revised version was released in 2012. His second book The Iraqi Christ, also a collection of short stories, was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014.

Both books have been translated to several languages, and when a selection from these was published in the US under the title The Corpse Exhibition in 2014, it was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

Blasim has been praised by Swedish critics, been rewarded by PEN three times, and in the Guardian he was mentioned as “possibly the best living Arabic author.”

Stefan Jonsson is a writer and critic at Dagens Nyheter and a professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at the University of Linköping. He has written several books on European modernity and modernism, as well as the colonial world order, most recently in Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Facism (Columbia UP, 2013) and together with Peo Hansens, Eurafrika: EUs colonial roots (Leopard 2015)