Kadhim Jihad Hassan was born in Southern Iraq in 1955. He has lived in France
since 1976, and became a naturalized French citizen in 1991. Hassan is a poet,
translator, literary critic, and professor of classical Arabic literature at
INALCO – Sorbonne Paris Cité. He has published, in Arabic and French, several critical
essays and collections of poems. His translations into Arabic include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Arthur Rimbaud’s Complete Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poetic Works, Jean
Genet’s Prisoner of Love, as well as several essays by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques
Derrida. In 2006, he was awarded the Prize for the Best Foreign Language
Translation by the Italian Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Ministry for
Cultural Assets and Activities) for his critical and annotated Arabic version of
Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, which joined the UNESCO Collection of
Representative Works in 2003. He was awarded the 2016 Gerard of Cremona
International Prize for the Promotion of Translation in the Mediterranean by the
Anna Lindh Foundation in Malta.
Tamaas
