Sweden: The Cradle of Kurdish Publishing

At a Glance

From the 1970s on, Kurdish intellectuals who reached Sweden built there the most productive Kurdish-language publishing scene in the world.
In March 1996 the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, a major Swedish daily, gave the figure: 500 Kurdish books had by then been printed in Sweden.
The same report recorded the 70 Kurdish members of the Swedish Writers' Union. A union officer, Peter Curman, had called it "the largest Kurdish writers' union in the world."
With its 1977 home-language reform, Sweden granted immigrant children the right to mother-tongue lessons; state funds supported publishing in minority languages.
M. Emin Bozarslan, in Uppsala, re-published by facsimile the five volumes of the journal Jîn (1985-1988) and the collection of the first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan.
Publishing houses such as Jîna Nû, Orfeus, APEC, and Nûdem produced a Kurdish library reaching from poetry to children's books, from dictionaries to translated literature.
Mehmed Uzun built the modern Kurdish novel largely in Stockholm; his novels were being translated into Swedish while they stood trial in Turkey.
The Kurdish Library was founded in February 1996; its premises were opened on 10 October 1997 by Sweden's Culture Minister, Marita Ulvskog.
The library also built a "banned books" archive, moving texts forbidden in Turkey onto the internet; the writings of Yaşar Kemal were among them.
"Stockholm, the capital of Kurdish literature" is the summary of this accumulation; this article weighs that claim against the record.

March 1996. An apartment flat in Huddinge, south of Stockholm. In the study, computers, microfilms, newspaper clippings, and boxes of books are piled one on another. The host is an exiled writer named Nedim Dağdeviren. That week Sweden's large newspaper Svenska Dagbladet made this room its story.

The claim in the headline was a big one: here the foundation of a national library is being laid. Dağdeviren's words are on record: the Kurds have no state, and so no national library; I want to build that library here. A state foundation, Stiftelsen Framtidens Kultur, had set aside 1.4 million kronor, the Swedish currency, for two years toward this dream.

A strange scene for a people of the mountains and of exile: a national library born thousands of kilometres from home, in a suburban flat. But the scene was no accident. That flat sat in the middle of a publishing network that had been building for twenty years. This article is the story of that network.

How Did the Kurds Come to Sweden?

First the people came, then the books. The first generation was the labour migration of the 1960s; it was small in number. The real waves are political: the military memorandum of 1971 and above all the coup of 12 September 1980 drove many Kurdish intellectuals, writers, and politicians out of Turkey and into Europe. To them were added those fleeing war and repression from Iraq and Iran. Sweden, a country with a relatively open asylum policy, took its share of these waves.

So why did the centre of publishing become Sweden and not somewhere else? Svenska Dagbladet's 1996 report counts three reasons: the absence of democracy in the Middle East, the great number of Kurdish intellectuals who came to Sweden, and Sweden's system of literary support. The pushing force was the ban; the pulling force was policy.

If one must give a number, caution is required. In the mid-1990s, sources put the number of Kurds in Sweden in the tens of thousands; today's estimates pass a hundred thousand. There is no exact figure, because Swedish statistics do not count ethnic origin. What is certain is this: out of this community, in proportion to its size, came an extraordinary density of writers.

Why Did the Swedish State Support Kurdish?

The answer is to be sought not in a special love for the Kurds but in a general policy. In 1977 Sweden brought in its home-language reform: immigrant children gained the right to take lessons in their own mother tongue at school. That right meant textbooks, teachers, and materials. Kurdish teaching material, banned in Turkey, was being ordered by the state in Sweden. This is why the list of the Jîna Nû publishing house in Uppsala carries Kurdish schoolbooks such as "Zimanê Min," My Language.

The second leg was the culture funds. Sweden's system of literary support gave printing grants to publishing in small languages. The 1.4 million kronor fund that gave birth to the Kurdish Library also came from a similar source, a culture foundation built from the money of the old wage-earner funds. The state and the Stockholm municipality supported the institution regularly in later years; the library's own presentation document records this.

The result is measured in figures. By 1996, 500 Kurdish books had been printed in Sweden; the content ran from translations of Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish children's author, to divans of poetry. The Swedish Writers' Union had 70 Kurdish members. Peter Curman's quip from the union went on record: the largest Kurdish writers' union in the world. A question presses itself: without this support, where would modern Kurdish literature have been printed?

A Man in Uppsala and the Yellowed Pages

One of the most lasting works of Swedish publishing was done in Uppsala, at the desk of a single man. M. Emin Bozarslan was a religious scholar and writer from Diyarbakır, a mainly Kurdish city in Turkey's southeast; he settled in Sweden in the 1970s. There he gave himself to an archive's task: to revive by facsimile the founding publications of the Kurdish press. A facsimile is a faithful copy of an old publication.

First came Jîn. This Kurdish-Turkish journal, published in Istanbul in 1918-1919, Bozarslan re-issued in five volumes, with translation and transcription. The volumes were printed in Uppsala between 1985 and 1988. Then the turn came for the very beginning: the collection of Kurdistan, the first Kurdish newspaper, born in Cairo in 1898, which he published from 1991 by the same method. We told that newspaper's story separately on this site.

To weigh what this labour means, ask what it saved. What would a student have to work with without it? The originals of these journals were gathering dust in a handful of libraries in the world. Thanks to Bozarslan's volumes, a student today can read the pages of 1898 and 1919. The history of the Kurdish press was tied to the present through this desk in Uppsala. Exile is sometimes not destruction but a repair workshop.

The Publishing Houses: A Language's Workshops

The web archive of the Kurdish Library lists close to thirty Sweden-based Kurdish publishing houses that ran distribution in the 1990s. When Dagens Nyheter wrote of this network in 1996, it noted that the presentations of 37 publishers had been put on the internet. Which of them carried the weight? Let me look closely at a few; the records come from the library's own catalogues.

Jîna Nû was founded in Uppsala. Its list holds Malmisanij and Mahmûd Lewendî's bibliography of the Kurdish press, a Zaza-Turkish dictionary, folklore collections, and facsimiles of the 1940s journals Roja Nû and Ronahî. Orfeus opened in Stockholm in 1987; it printed Mehmed Uzun's first novels. APEC was founded in Spånga in 1989; it built a catalogue reaching from the divan of the poet Şêrko Bêkes to the life story of Cegerxwîn. Nûdem was born in Järfälla in 1994; the house of the writer Firat Cewerî carried Beckett, Camus, and Chekhov into Kurdish and reprinted Celadet Alî Bedirxan's grammar.

One more small but telling example: the Kurdistan Women's Association in Sweden founded its own publishing house and issued Brecht in Kurdish in 1992. Neighbouring houses in other countries, such as Xanî & Bateyî in Copenhagen, also ran their distribution through the Kurdish Publishing Center in Huddinge. The network did not fit into one country, but its switchboard was Sweden.

A pattern stands out in these catalogues. On the same shelves stand poetry, the novel, the dictionary, grammar, the children's book, the schoolbook, and the classics of world literature. This is more than a taste for literature: it is a program to build, one by one, the missing institutions of a language. The banned language built itself a full library in exile. The story of Cegerxwîn's divans and his Stockholm years is a separate article on this site.

Mehmed Uzun: The Man Who Built the Novel in Exile

The best-known fruit of this scene is Mehmed Uzun. Born in 1953, Uzun spoke Kurdish in childhood; at school Turkish was compulsory. At eighteen, a few Kurdish lines published in a journal put him in the Diyarbakır military prison. His own account is on record: among the intellectuals in prison he learned the history of his own culture, and read there the Kurdish books smuggled in. In 1976 he was tried again in Ankara as the editor responsible for a Kurdish-Turkish journal; in 1977 he went to Sweden.

In Sweden he took on a labour like a porter's. What does it take to write a novel in a language stripped of its tools? Before he could write, he had to repair the language itself. He listened to recordings of the dengbêj, the master bards of the oral tradition, combed through dictionaries, and built a literary language word by word. His first novels were printed in Stockholm from the mid-1980s; Orfeus's catalogue records Mirina Kalekî Rind (1987) and Sîya Evînê (1989). One of his novels tells the life of Celadet Alî Bedirxan, founder of the journal Hawar. His books were translated into Swedish; Swedish writers elected him to the board of their own union.

But the gap between his two countries did not close. The same novels stood trial in a state security court in Turkey in 2001-2002. The letters of solidarity sent to the deputy prime minister and to Ankara sit in the library's archive. The cases were dropped; Uzun returned to Diyarbakır, ill, after 2005, and died there in 2007. The language he built in exile came home with his coffin.

A Library at Skeppsholmen

The work that began in the Huddinge flat became an institution. The Kurdish Library, by its own account, was founded in February 1996. Its building was opened on 10 October 1997, near Skeppsholmen, one of Stockholm's central islands; the ribbon was cut by Sweden's Culture Minister, Marita Ulvskog. The institution became a foundation in 1999 and began to lend. On its shelves gathered a collection from all the dialects of Kurdish and from books about the Kurds in dozens of languages.

The library had one more task: an archive against censorship. Dağdeviren and his friends built a "library of banned books," putting texts forbidden in Turkey onto the internet. Dagens Nyheter reported this in 1996: the writings of Yaşar Kemal, published abroad and the subject of conviction in Turkey, were being opened to the internet from the Göteborg Book Fair. Le Monde recorded another scene in 1999: at the launch of a comprehensive Turkish-Kurdish dictionary, the president of the Turkish Federation in Sweden, Osman Özkanat, took the podium and said this: I would have wanted this book printed in Turkey; I cannot explain to my children why Kurdish is banned there.

The library was not a place for praise-songs; the diaspora's bitter debates entered the archive too. What is kept there when a community turns on itself? The writings on Fadime Şahindal, the young woman killed by her father in Uppsala in 2002, are preserved on the library's pages together with academic texts by Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour that discussed the honour killing as a problem of Kurdish society itself. A national library keeps what it is proud of and what shames it alike. The choice here was for the whole of memory.

Was Stockholm Really the "Capital"?

Now to the thesis. "Stockholm, the capital of Kurdish literature" was repeated for years. How much of it is record, and how much exile romanticism?

The documented part is strong. The country where the most Kurdish books were printed in the world, in the 1980s and 1990s, was Sweden; the Swedish press of the period and the Kurdish publishers alike say so. The founding texts of the modern Kurdish novel, the first comprehensive bibliographies, the facsimile archives, and the first institutional Kurdish library were produced there. A diaspora small in number affected the whole Kurdish geography in its literary output.

Let me write the limits too. The readers of these books had mostly stayed in the homeland; print runs were small, and getting the books to Kurdistan was a separate struggle. When the legal field opened in Turkey in the 2000s, the weight shifted back to Diyarbakır and Istanbul; many books printed in Sweden were re-published there. So Stockholm was not a permanent capital but the provisional seat of government of the ban years. Literary historians now read the period this way.

The scale's summary is this: Sweden did not champion Kurdish, it championed its own principles, freedom of expression and the right to a mother tongue. In the shade of those principles the Kurds did their own work. The cradle was Sweden, the baby was Kurdish, and when the baby grew it walked home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why were Kurdish books printed most of all in Sweden? Three factors met: the bans continuing in Turkey and neighbouring countries, the density of Kurdish intellectuals who took refuge in Sweden after 1980, and the Swedish state's policies of mother-tongue lessons and publishing support. By 1996, 500 Kurdish books had been printed in Sweden.

When was the Kurdish Library in Stockholm founded? The institution was founded in February 1996; its building was opened on 10 October 1997 by Culture Minister Marita Ulvskog. It gained foundation status in 1999. Its founder was the exiled writer and publisher Nedim Dağdeviren.

What did M. Emin Bozarslan do in Sweden? In Uppsala, he re-published by facsimile the founding publications of the Kurdish press: the journal Jîn of 1918-1919 in five volumes (1985-1988), and the collection of the Kurdistan newspaper of 1898-1902 from 1991 on.

Why did Mehmed Uzun write in Sweden? He was imprisoned twice in Turkey over Kurdish publishing and went to Sweden in 1977. He wrote his novels there, in the years Kurdish was banned. After 2005 he returned to Diyarbakır; he died in 2007.

Which were the Kurdish publishing houses in Sweden? The Kurdish Library archive lists close to thirty houses. Among the notable ones: Jîna Nû and Bozarslan's editions in Uppsala, Orfeus and Roja Nû in Stockholm, APEC in Spånga, Nûdem in Järfälla. Neighbouring houses such as Xanî & Bateyî in Denmark used the same distribution network.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

The Kurdish Library (Stockholm) web archive, institutional presentation text: founding and opening dates, collection and foundation information come from here.
Press clippings in the Kurdish Library archive: Svenska Dagbladet (5 March 1996), Dagens Nyheter (27 October 1996), Le Monde (27 November 1999).
The Kurdish Library's publishing-house catalogues: Jîna Nû, APEC, Orfeus, Nûdem, the Kurdistan Women's Association editions, Xanî & Bateyî, and Bozarslan's facsimiles.
The Kurdish Library "Freedom" archive: the Mehmed Uzun file, the Ordfront presentation text, and the 2002 solidarity letters.
Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour's text on Fadime Şahindal (from the library archive).

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

In 1996 the Swedish press wrote it: more Kurdish books were printed in Sweden than anywhere in the world, 500 by then. The banned language had found itself a print shop in the north: bedelboseli.com/en/sweden-cradle-of-kurdish-publishing
The library of a people with no national library was born in a suburban flat. Founded in February 1996, the Kurdish Library was opened in 1997 by Sweden's own Culture Minister: bedelboseli.com/en/sweden-cradle-of-kurdish-publishing
In Uppsala, M. Emin Bozarslan revived by facsimile the Kurdistan newspaper of 1898 and the journal Jîn of 1919. Exile, at that desk, was not destruction but a repair workshop: bedelboseli.com/en/sweden-cradle-of-kurdish-publishing
Mehmed Uzun wrote his novels in Stockholm while the same novels stood trial in Turkey. He died in Diyarbakır in 2007; the language he built came home with him: bedelboseli.com/en/sweden-cradle-of-kurdish-publishing
Beckett, Camus, and Brecht were carried into Kurdish in Sweden in the 1990s. A language, in the very century it was banned, built itself a full library in exile: bedelboseli.com/en/sweden-cradle-of-kurdish-publishing