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One thing to be said about Syria is that it is an ancient country, with a civilization, history, and culture which go back thousands of years, and which has consistently produced great writers and poets over the centuries.Īs for international writers, the names that spring to mind are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Françoise Sagan, Alberto Moravia, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare, W. To mention a few examples: Omar Abu Reishe, Nizar Qabbani, and Sulaiman Al-Issa. There are also many poets that I admire but not all of whose names I recall today.
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The Syrian writers whom I like the most are Zakaria Tamer, Sadalallah Wannus, Adel Abu Shanab, and Kamar Kilani. Who are the Syrian writers you most admire, and why? I devoted myself to literature afterward, but, unfortunately, a foolish war was waged on my country, Syria, and I had to flee to Turkey. I continued to write throughout the coming decades and during all that time I practiced my job as a lawyer, which earned me a decent living, and then I retired on January 1, 2011. I understood then why literature is said to be “the art of expressing one’s agony.” I did not write a story, but the story guided my hand to write it so that I could relieve my pain and stress. I went through a sad and confusing period, and I wrote my first story, “Greeting Card,” followed by another one, “Tomorrow is Another Day.” Literature and writing followed me and inspired me to be a writer because of the realities around me, especially after 1970. But what led me to start writing a book was the aftermath of our defeat by Israel on June 5, 1967.
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My profession as a lawyer often consumed all of my reading and writing energy. Since the days of al-Jahiz, people have used the expression “he works as a writer” to refer to someone who is poor! But I did not want to be a writer, I think because literature in our country was not well appreciated: it could often lead one to poverty and unemployment. Even before I received my high school diploma, I had finished reading the Jurji Zaidan's History of Arabic Literature. Being a writer was not one of my wishes or aims, although I was an insatiable reader-when I was a student in elementary school, I used to read the great Arab authors, such as Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, Abbas Mahmud Akkad, and Taha Hussein. I became a writer by coincidence I never thought or knew I would become the writer I am now today. Alice Guthrie spoke to him from Turkey in July 2014: the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.-The EditorsĬan you tell me how you began writing, and what made you continue for all those long years, even while holding down a career and having a family? Since leaving, he has shifted his creative practice from prose to poetry-as featured here. Mohamed Raouf Bachir was a successful and celebrated writer of short stories in Syria in the sixties and seventies, becoming a member of the state-sponsored Arab Writers Union, on the Story and Novel Committee in 1974, and later honored as the “ Sheikh of Aleppo’s Authors.” Now in his eighties, he has gone into exile in Turkey, having lost his home in Aleppo along with its contents, including his entire literary archive, and endured a traumatic exit from his homeland, like so many others.