Hassan Blasim ,

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi-born writer, poet, and filmmaker who fled Iraq in 2000 due to persecution under Saddam Hussein's regime and settled in Finland as a refugee in 2004, where he now lives in Helsinki as a Finnish citizen.[1][2][3] He studied at the Baghdad Academy of Cinematic Arts, directed films under a pseudonym in Iraqi Kurdistan, and gained international acclaim with short story collections like *The Madman of Freedom Square* (2009) and *The Iraqi Christ* (2013), the latter winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014; his debut novel *God 99* was published in 2020.[3][4][6] Often hailed as one of the greatest living Arab writers by outlets like The Guardian, his works, translated into over 20 languages, explore themes of war, exile, and horror in Iraq.[2][3][7]