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Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist. He was born in 1951 in Qamishli, an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse city in northern Syria. He moved to Damascus in the early 1970s and then on to Beirut. In 1982 the escalating political and sectarian tensions in the war-torn city forced him to leave for Cyprus, where he remained over fifteen years. He has been residing in Stockholm, Sweden, since 1999. He has published over forty-six works of poetry and prose, including three autobiographies.