Blasim, Hassan

The author and filmmaker Hassan Blasim was born in Baghdad, Iraq, as one of nine siblings in a Shiite family. He was brought up in a home where there were plenty of books, and his father, an army officer, was a book-lover. Blasim read both Arab literature and Western authors such as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Kafka, Calvin and Borges at a young age. As a child he enjoyed writing poetry, plays and making literary puzzles. He found a crossword in a magazine when he was fourteen and proceeded to make a crossword of his own, which he was able to sell. It won him his mother’s respect. She was illiterate and had so far considered his literary interests to be idle pastimes and a waste of time.