Rodaan Al Galidi
Rodaan Al Galidi is a Dutch poet and writer. He was born in Iraq and trained as an engineer, and has lived in the Netherlands since 1998. As an undocumented asylum seeker, he did not have the right to attend language classes, so he taught himself to read and write Dutch. His novel De autist en de postduif won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011.
Books by Rodaan Al Galidi
De autist en de postduif
by Rodaan Al Galidi
Winner of the 2011 European Prize for Literature
This book, The Autistic Boy and the Carrier Pigeon, has not been translated into English yet.
The Leash and the Ball
by Rodaan Al Galidi & Translated by Jonathan Reeder
The Leash and the Ball by Rodaan Al Galidi is a laugh-out-loud funny novel about Samir, an Iraqi civil engineer who ends up as a refugee in the Netherlands. The wry commentary on the difference between Arabic and northern European attitudes to all sorts of things—from jihad to dinner etiquette to the bureaucratic machine asylum seekers find themselves enmeshed in—is completely fascinating. The book came out in 2020 in the Netherlands (entitled simply Holland) but has now been translated into English by Jonathan Reeder.
