Manal Al-Sheikh

Manal Al-Sheikh is a poet from Nineveh in northern Iraq. She has a degree in English-Arabic translation from the College of Arts at Mosul University, and has worked in the local and wider Arab press as a freelance journalist. She has also been a very active participant in the Arab Union of Writers since 1993. Her literary and creative articles and texts have been published in several Iraqi, Arab and European newspapers and magazines, and she has also published collections of her own poetry as well as edited an anthology of modern Iraqi poetry. 

Her first book, Inhirafut-tawabeet (The Deviation of Coffins), was published by the Iraqi Union of Writers in Nineveh in 1996. In 2007, she edited and published Umaraur-ruaa (Princes of Imaginative Visions), an anthology of modern Iraqi poetry. She published Assfar Alo’zlah (Books of Seclusion) in Egypt in 2008 and in 2009 Belnokta elhamraa tahta eynhi elyousrah (With a red dot under his left eye). In 2010 she published the poetry collection Impossible letters

Manal Al-Sheikh's work is translated into several languages, including Norwegian, English, Italian, Catalan and French. She was Stavanger City of Refuge's guest writer from 2009 to 2011.