Jalal Barzanji
Jalal Barzanji (1953) is a poet and journalist. Since 1970 he has published seven book of poetry and numerous critical columns. After his two-years imprisonment by Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1980s and further political repression into the 1990s, Barzanji and his family fled to Turkey. They remained there for 3 months eventually immigrating to Canada. In 2007 he was appointed as Edmonton’s first PEN Canada Writer-in-Exile. His first work in English, The Man in Blue Pyjamas, was published by the University of Alberta Press in 2011.