Periscope Books and Kurdish Culture Project are pleased to invite you to an evening honouring Bakhtiyar Ali, the foremost Kurdish novelist whose epic I Stared at the Night of the City was published in the autumn. The first major work of contemporary Kurdish literature to be translated into English, I Stared at the Night of the City is a masterful allegory of modern Iraqi Kurdistan, where everything, even the imagination itself, is bought, sold and controlled by a secretive elite – a state of affairs resisted only by a motley band of friends with uncanny abilities.

Join translator Kareem Abdulrahman and us in raising a glass to Bakhtiyar at the stately Burgh House in Hampstead, and don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet one of the most compelling writers of the modern Middle East.