Arab Shamilov


Arab Shamilov was a Yazidi Kurdish novelist who lived in the Soviet Union. He was born in the city of Kars in present-day north-eastern Turkey.

Early career

During World War I, from 1914 to 1917, he served as an interpreter for the Russian army. Later on, he became a member of the central committee of the Armenian Communist Party.
In 1931, he began working on Kurdish literature at the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Studies. He assisted in developing a Latin-based alphabet for the Kurdish language in 1927.
He became a member of the editorial board of the Kurdish newspaper Riya Teze, published in Yerevan from 1930 to 1937. In Leningrad, he also met the Kurdish linguist Qenatê Kurdo and published his work as a document about Kurdish language in Armenia.

Literary output

His first and most celebrated work, the story The Kurmanji Shepherd, based on his own life, was published in 1935 and later translated into Italian as Il pastore kurmanji.
In 1937, he was exiled by Joseph Stalin and was only allowed to return to Armenia after 19 years, in 1956, following Stalin's death.
In 1959, he published his first Kurmanji novel, Jiyana Bextewer that was then translated into Armenian and later also into Russian. In 1966, he published a historical novel, Dimdim, inspired by the old Kurmanji folk tale of Kela Dimdimê about Dimdim Castle. It has been translated into Italian as well.
In 1967, he published a collection of Kurmanji folk stories in Moscow.

Books

  1. Şivanê Kurmanca, the first Kurdish novel
  2. Barbang
  3. Jiyana Bextewar
  4. Dimdim
  5. Hopo