Kurdish Canadian writer Dilan Qadir has been named as the recipient of 2023 PEN Canada-Humber College Writers in Exile Scholarship.

The scholarship is awarded annually to a member of PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile community. PEN Canada is a non-partisan organization that celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression and assists writers in peril at home and abroad.

The scholarship program is for writers working on book-length projects – such as a novel, short story collection or a book of poetry. It includes one-on-one support from a professional writer and mentor and, this year, Qadir will be mentored by the award-winning writer and Creative Director of the Humber School for Writers, David Bezmozgis.

"I'm grateful for the opportunity provided by the Humber Scholarship," said Qadir. "I hope the mentorship will provide much needed guidance in revising what will be my first novel."

His writing, both in Kurdish and English, has appeared in various publications including Quae Nocent Docent Anthology, The Lonely Whale Memoir Anthology, the Culture Project, and WordCityLit. He was the 2022 Writer in Residence at the Caetani Centre and his poems were longlisted for the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry in 2022.

His new novel, with tentative title The Cave of Butterflies, is a fictional account of an Iraqi family living under the American occupation in 2003. The family — four adopted siblings and their adoptive parents — must reckon with the immediate effects of war and its aftermath as a world that was once familiar becomes strange. The novel is still in development.

Growing up in Darbandikhan in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, Qadir has written about Kurdish politics and lack of freedom in the region. He left Iraq in exile in 2014 after for his safety.

Past recipients of the Writers in Exile Scholarship include Maria Saba (2020), Arzu Yildiz (2021), and Luis Horacio Nájera (2022).