Salim Barakat is a Syrian novelist and poet. He was born in Qamishli, in the Jazira, the northern part of Syria, a predominantly Kurdish area also inhabited by Arabs, Assyrians, and other minorities. In 1970, he went to study literature in Damascus, and then quickly moved to Beirut. He worked for a well-known literary magazine, al-Karmel, directed by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In 1982, he traveled in Cyprus, and eventually settled in Sweden in 1999, where he still lives today. His novels are so numerous that it is not easy to label his work: many of his novels belong to magical realism genre, such as The Caves of Haydrahodahose (2004), a central work inspired by Kurdish mythology, or the more recent Captive Girls of Sinjar (2016), depicting the fate of Kurdish women during the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, but he also wrote important realistic and autobiographical works focusing on his childhood in the Jazira, like The Iron Grasshopper (1993). Most critics in the Arab world and the West consider Salim Barakat as one of the most prominent Syrian authors. His works, written in a sophisticated and poetic language, are complex. Though many of his novels have been translated into French, very few works are available in English.