Kader Abdolah is the penname of Hossein Farahani, an Iranian writer who also writes in Dutch. He studied physics in Iran before fleeing the country as a political refugee. He settled in the Netherlands in 1988, where he has become an unusual and unique voice in Dutch literature. His novels tell of both the magic illusion and the bitter reality of his homeland. My Father's Notebook was the first of his novels translated into English, and The House of the Mosque was recently released worldwide in English translation to great acclaim. In 2008 he published an alternative Dutch translation of the Koran, which sold over 100,000 copies in six months. Currently he is Visiting Writer-in-Residence at UC Berkeley.

Presented by: Dutch Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages and the

Department of Comparative Literature's “Year of Translation.”