muli2Dr Muli Amaye, Principal Investigaor

Muli is head of the English Department at Soran University in Kurdistan. She is a novelist and short story writer and sometime poet and her research interests are in migration, women, memory and identity. She gained an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. The idea for the Many Women, Many Words project was conceived from a desire to add women’s voices to the national grand narrative that is distinctly male. She has more than ten years experience working with communities in both research and writing. She was co-editor of The Suitcase Book of Love Poems and the anthology Migration Stories.

 

grahamProfessor Graham Mort, Co-Investigator

Graham is a distance learning specialist and designed and ran the British Council Crossing Borders mentoring scheme for African writers (2001-2006).  He was the UK adviser and designer for the British Council Beyond Borders literature festival (Kampala 2005), designed and piloted Radiophonics, a new British Council radio-writing project in East/West Africa, and was a co-applicant on Moving Manchester. Other academic research has focused on emergent African writing, eLearning and the pedagogy of Creative Writing. He has published nine collections of poetry and also writes short fiction and radio drama. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/english-and-creative-writing/about-us/people/graham-mort

 

shamalShamal A. Abdullah, Researcher

Shamal has been an assistant translator at Soran University since 2012, with a secondary appointment at Rawanduz Private Technical Institute as a Website Translator and Moderator. He holds Bachelor of Arts in English language from Soran University. His projects include Translating Moodle (course management system) from English into Kurdish. He has supervised the translation of the future planned electronic system of Soran University into Kurdish. He is a member of the research team for the Many Woman, Many Words project, undertaking interviews and translation. His research interest is in translation studies and creative writing. Shamal is a great tennis fan and a non-professional player of the sport!

 

serwaSarwa Azeez Abdulghafoor, Researcher/Translator

Sarwa completed an MA in English Literature at Leicester University in 2012. Growing up in wartime Iraq, the flickering light of a kerosene lantern did not reduce her passion for reading. She is currently a lecturer at Soran University, teaching creative writing and translation. Her main interests are reading and writing, especially fiction writing. Sarwa has worked with an activist community doing humanitarian work with women. She is also passionate about indigenous studies, diaspora studies, race, colonial and post-colonial studies. Her main goals are to raise awareness for education and learning in the community to create a better future for Kurdistan. Sarwa writes poetry and short fiction and last year was the winner of both categories at the International Literature Festival in Erbil. Her writing looks for the beauty in a war torn world. It also seeks to define identity and confront issues of equal gender representation and violence in male dominant communities. To follow her interests, she is now working on two projects; both of them are aimed at finding women’s voices through their narratives and works of literature. She dreams that one day women can speak for themselves and pass that understanding across nations.

 

roshna2Roshna Rasheed Sabri, Researcher

Roshna studied English language and literature at Soran University and graduated in 2013. Now she works as a research assistant and translator in Soran university. Her main interests are reading, writing and researching. The areas she enjoys working in are mostly involving fiction and criticism. She is passionate about postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, race and survival literature. She writes poetry and translates literary essays. Since she is female she is passionate about women issues and her aim is to have a hand in educating the new female generation to strive for their rights and know about their dreams for she knows how much women are suffering in a male dominant society. Her effort is to make the new generation understand it’s the war that destroys our hearts, they should carry the message of love and peace and they must believe in beauty and equality and pass these beliefs across nations. She worked as a researcher in Many Women, Many Words project. The experience of listening to women telling the story of their survival in dark days made her smile, cry, feel pity and finally feel so proud of being a woman and being Kurdish.

 

quemaiNguyen Phan Que Mai, Editor
Que Mai has over 15 years of experience working on development and gender issues with disadvantaged groups of people including war victims. She is the author and translator of fourteen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. In 2015, Que Mai received a scholarship to pursue her PhD research with Lancaster University, where she is writing a novel about Amerasians – children who were born into relationships between American soldiers and Vietnamese women and abandoned during or after the war. In working with ‘Many Women, Many Words’, Que Mai reflects on the turbulent experiences suffered by women from her own country – Vietnam – and the importance of documenting these stories so as they will not be lost or forgotten. www.nguyenphanquemai.com/en/