The Madman of Freedom Square

From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim's stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers' expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence. Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.

About the Author :
Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi writer currently based in Finland. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city's Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films 'Gardenia' (screenplay & director) and 'White Clay' (screenplay) won the Academy's Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years. In 1998, after several arrests, he was advised by his tutors to leave Baghdad - the overtly political and critical nature of his films was drawing attention from Saddam's informants at the Academy. He fled - initially to Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he made feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the Kurdish pseudonym 'Ouazad Osman' - and ultimately in 2004, after years of travelling illegally through Europe as a refugee, he settled in Finland. Hassan's stories first appeared on the website iraqstory.com, which he co-edited, and then first in print, with the anthology Madinah (commissioned by Comma Press in 2008). His debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was published by Comma a year later, 2009 (translated by Jonathan Wright) and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His second collection, The Iraqi Christ (again translated by Jonathan Wright) was published by Comma in April 2013, and won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize - the first Arabic title and the first short story collection ever to win the award. Hassan's work has been translated (or is in the process of being translated) into over 20 languages. A heavily censored Arabic edition of Madman was finally published in 2012 and was immediately banned in Jordan, and an Arabic edition of The Iraqi Christ was published in 2015. A selection of stories from both of his two collections were published in the US in 2014, by Penguin USA, under the title 'The Corpse Exhibition', which was later picked as one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2014.

Review :
'Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic... his taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.' - The Independent; 'Crisp and shocking.... Too febrile and macabre to file under reportage, this cruel, funny and unsettling debut has hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind.' - The Guardian; 'Blasim moves adeptly between surreal, internalised states of mind and ironic commentary on Islamic extremism and the American invasion... excellent.' - The Metro