Azher Jerjis

Azhar Jerjis is an Iraqi writer and novelist, born in Baghdad in 1973. From 2003 onwards, he worked as a journalist in Iraq and published a number of articles and stories in local and Arab newspapers and periodicals. In 2005, he wrote a satirical book about terrorist militias entitled Terrorism…Earthly Hell. As a result of this book, there was an assassination attempt against him and he was forced to flee the country. He went to Syria, then Casablanca and finally to Norway, where he now lives permanently. His published works include two short story collections, Above the Country of Blackness (2015) and The Sweetmaker (2017), and his first novel, Sleeping in the Cherry Field (2019). He works as a cultural editor for the Norwegian Telemark newspaper, and as a simultaneous translator between Arabic and Norwegian.