Sorin Masifi
- Sweden -
Sorin Masifi (1982) is a poet and a writer based in Sweden, born in Erbil / Kurdistan. Masifi holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the English Department at Stockholm University. In 2022 she published her debut book Staten Systrarna Dikten. The reviews were overwhelmingly remarkable, and the book was nominated to The Swedish Writer’s Union Catapult Prize for best Swedish literary debut, Borås Newspaper’s Debutant prize and Swedish Radio Poetry Prize. In 2024 she was awarded The Migrant prize by Småland’s Literary festival for writing in the spirit of the great Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. In March 2025 she published her second book Skadad Skapad Åter, a poetic testimony of grief and survival — this book bears witness to a devastating series of events, and the long, path toward healing through psychoanalysis, poetry and God.
Masifi has worked as a librarian, where she has worked with activities aimed at promoting reading among adults. For the past three years she visits Kurdistan regularly where she stays for periods.
In Sorin Masifi's widely-acclaimed and prize-winning poetry debut, Staten, Systrarna, Dikten (2022), two Kurdish sisters weave together the broken threads of family history and colonial displacement through creative fabulation and childhood games. Moving through home-spun nursery rhymes, propulsive melodies, and song, Masifi's poems sift through childhood's microscopic landscapes and erratic moods, where plants, marbles, and word games exist horizontally with inherited tales and the dead. The porous boundaries between life and death are explored and traversed in play, as the sisters "collect rocks and name them after losses"; "It is true that small skulls rolled in and out of our dreams."
"A weapon, an archive, a poem" – as the collection calls itself – it evolves into a profound meditation on the struggles of a Kurdish family trying to survive in the wake of statelessness and dispersal, offering a cartography of losses extending across time and geographies. Alongside the sisters is Ba, who insists on the importance of tending to one's garden, and Da, who silently mourns a dissident brother executed in the homeland; together, they form a "disparate whole", a unit bound together with fragile threads.
This fragility is underscored by the introduction of the death of the sister, after which the poems shift between elegiac blank verse and taut, sparsely articulated prose. Concerned with tropes of invisibility and historical amnesia that often accompany literary portrayals of the Kurdish diaspora, the poems explore the erosion of identity and self through an acutely personal, situated lens — buried beneath the Swedish snow, falling page after page. Yet they also celebrate the power of poetry to narrativize history beyond its official forms. In the poems as well as in the siblings' childhood games, the erasures and violences of the past are re-inscribed as poetic form– turning loss into play, and play into a vision of collective futurity: "For this game is our future, lost and found."
Rooted in this intimate family narrative, the collection embraces an expansive and multi-medial form of documentary poetics. Incorporating archival footage from the Iran-Iraq War, news excerpts, and personal letters, Masifi’s poetry gradually uncovers the contours of Kurdistan's colonial history, and pays tribute to the anti-imperialist struggle for Kurdish self-determination. Through the interweaving of quotations from Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite and Kurdish poets such as Ahmed Arif and Salim Barakat — along with untranslated Kurdish passages in both Kurmanji and Sorani — a genealogy of parents and daughters, poets, writers, and freedom fighters ultimately comes into view.
Written by Viola Bao
Poetry
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part I / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del I
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part II / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del II
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part III / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del III
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part IV / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del IV
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part V / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del V
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part VI / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del VI
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part VII / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del VII
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part VIII / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del VIII
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part IX / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del IX
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State, Sisters, Poetry – part X / Staten, systrarna, dikten – del X
