Kurdish Publishing - another perspective on Independence

A Kurdish publisher claims to have taken a major step towards a new degree of freedom of the press for Kurdistan in releasing Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination and paying the author. Should give you pause if you’re out there trumpeting simplistic ideologies of indie like “never signing with any publisher or label” because that’s not quite it, is it? Independence has more to do with recognizing who, in your specific context, might be exerting conforming pressures on your decision making, and then finding ways, means, and allies to extricate yourself peacefully and creatively (an endless process, I suspect):

Like elsewhere in the Middle East, print runs in Iraqi Kurdistan tend to be small and writers are poorly-paid, hence the trend of “vanity” publishing for those who can afford it.

Making things more difficult, the government and political parties own most of the publishing houses, which means many books are published because of the writers’ political connections, rather than on literary merit.

In this case, the novelist and his publisher hope that the deal will herald the end of government and political party control of the market.

“We want to free the Kurdish intelligentsia from the control of the parties,” says Ali’s publisher, Tariq Fatih.