I Am Going to Kill Somebody

Winner of the 2024 Premiere Ostana International Prize

Foreword by Agri Ismaïl

Temo is forty-two, fresh out of prison, and living with his dying mother. When he wakes up one morning to a voice telling him he's going to kill somebody, he slips a kitchen knife into his pocket and wanders through the unnamed capital of Kurdistan. After fifteen years of torture and a lifetime of having his fate handed to him, he plans to choose his own victim and silence the voice. But he isn't the only one looking for an escape. Across the city, Diana sits with her pimp in a café waiting for a client who could be her ticket out. A writer from Europe arrives to give a reading of his new book in Kurdish, his first time doing so, already questioning why he ever returned. As their paths converge over the course of a single day, their lives are changed in ways they never could have anticipated. From the celebrated Kurdish translator of Dostoevsky, I Am Going to Kill Somebody is a subversive literary thriller on the absurdity of being Kurdish in an adversarial world.

"What I Am Going to Kill Somebody does, which I don't think any other work has managed to do, is to portray honor as the sediment which remains when there are no individual rights that are guaranteed by a state, something that emerges as a reaction not to power, as the Romantics had it, but to powerlessness."-Agri Ismaïl, author of Hyper

"Cewerî wields his pen in a manner similar to Albert Camus. He turns everything inside out, presenting us with an inner portrait of souls while laying their lives bare before our eyes. It is a work that tells the story of individuals' dreams and disappointments in a dark city in modern times, where constructive and destructive language merge within the same narrative."-Burhan Sönmez, author of Lovers of Franz K. and PEN International President

Firat Cewerî is a Kurdish writer, translator, and publisher who fled Turkey for Sweden in 1980 to write freely. He has since produced forty books, twenty original works and twenty translations into Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), ranging from Dostoevsky and Steinbeck to Swedish authors including Karin Boye, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, as well as children's classics by Astrid Lindgren and others. In 1992, he founded the literary journal Nûdem (New Time), running it for a decade while nurturing emerging Kurdish writers, and later launched Nûdem Werger (New Time Translation) to bring world literature into Kurdish. His own fiction has been translated into numerous languages and adapted for film and theater. A Swedish Writers' Union member since 1987, he has served on the Swedish PEN board and contributed to major Swedish newspapers. His honors include the Swedish Academy's Interpretation Prize (2018), the Golden Pen Prize from Northern Iraq's Minister of Culture (2020), the Swedish Academy's Award for Promoting Swedish Culture Abroad (2023), and Italy's Premiere Ostana International Prize (2024).

Jeannette Okur coordinates the Turkish Studies program in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and teaches courses in language, literature, film, and cultural studies. Her current research explores the relationships between perpetrators and victims of political violence portrayed in transnational novels by Turkish- and Iraqi-Kurdish writers in exile. She is the author of an open media-rich Turkish textbook titled Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! (Center for Open Education Resources and Language Learning, 2021) and co-editor of Teaching Turkish and Turkic Languages During the Pandemic: Past, Present and Future Directions. Proceedings of the AATT Conference (Turko-Tatar Press, 2022).