Nazand Begikhani

Nazand Begikhani (born 1964 in Iraq) is a contemporary Kurdish/British writer, poet and leading academic researcher into gender based violence, and an active advocate of human rights. She is an honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, Centre for Gender and Violence Research and has been awarded the Vincent Wright Chair 2019/2020 and works as a visiting professor at Sciences Po School for International Affairs, Paris.[1]

Begikhani was born in Kurdistan by the steps of the Zagros Mountains and has been living in Europe (Denmark, France and United Kingdom) since 1987. She received her M.A and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Sorbonne in France, and published her first collection of poems in Paris, 1995. She has published five poetry collections in Kurdish and Bells of Speech is her first collection in English. Two of her poetry collections have been translated into French, Couleur de Sable (2011) and Le Lendemain d'Hier (2013). She has also translated works of Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot into Kurdish. Her works in English and French have been published by the Poetry Magazine, Ambit magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Exiled Writers' Ink, Action Poétique, etc. Her poetry collections have been translated into many other languages, including Arabic, Persian and German.

Nazand Begikhani is also an active advocate of human rights and helped establish a number of activist-based networks, studies centers and feminist campaigns, including Kurdish Women Action against Honour Killing (KWAHK), later changed to Kurdish Women's Rights Watch (KWRW)and gender-related studies centers in Kurdistan. She has provided expert advice on honour-based violence (HBV) to a number of government bodies, including Sweden, UK and Kurdistan. Between 2007 and 2009, she sat on the board of the High Commission to Monitor Violence Against Women in Kurdistan Region and participated, as an expert witness and independent observer, in its seasonal meetings. In 2010, with colleagues from the University of Bristol, she established the pioneering Gender and Violence Studies Centre at the University of Sulaimaniya (now Gender Equality Center), a two-year project funded by the British Council. She is currently advising Kurdistan President to address higher education and gender in Kurdistan Region. She has integrated the concept of gender into Kurdistan Region's curriculum with the aim to develop feminist research and produce evidence-based knowledge on sexual and gender-based violence to inform policy and practice. Her work has had considerable influence on action and strategy to address HBV in Kurdistan. She has published academic work in Kurdish, English and French.

Nazand Begikhani has worked with the Kurdish Institute of Paris, the Kurdish Cultural Centre in London, the BBC BBC Monitoring, the University of Bristol as senior research fellow][1] and Le Monde Diplomatique as editor in chief of the Kurdish edition.[2]

Nazand Begikhani has won several international prizes for her work and activities, including the UK Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for her work combating honor crimes (2000) and French Simone Landrey's Feminine Poetry Prize (2012) for her poetry work.[3] in 2017, she was awarded the French Honorary Citizenship by the City of Chateaux-Renault.