Selim Temo

Selim Temo is a poet, translator and academic. He was born in Mêrîna, a village near Batman, Northern Kurdistan. He earned a BA in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from Ankara University, and completed a Master’s and PhD in Turkish Literature at Bilkent University. He was a professor of Kurdish and
Turkish Languages and Literatures at Mardin Artuklu University. However, he was dismissed from the university in 2017, because of the Academics for Peace petition he signed along with more than 2,000 academics from Turkey in support of the political, social and other basic rights of Kurdish people. Temo also worked as a columnist in newspapers, such as Radikal (2013-2014), Duvar (2017-2019) and Xwebûn (2019-2020). The literary awards he has received include the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poetry Award (1997), Halkevleri Novel Award (1998) and Hrant Dink Foundation’s “Lights of 2011.” His work has been translated into several languages, including German, Basque, Armenian, Persian, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish. Nightlands is his first collection in English. He worked as a visiting scholar at University of Exeter in 2011 and Paul Valéry University in Montpellier in 2020-21. He is the author of seven poetry books, one novel, one poetry anthology, eight translated works from Kurdish to Turkish, and five research and history books. He lives in Paris.