Newsweek Names Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree Among Its Favorite Books of 2025

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Renowned Kurdish Author Bachtyar Ali along side his book in both English and Kurdish.

The American Newsweek Magazine published its staff's favorite books for 2025, among which was renowned Kurdish novelist and author Bachtyar Ali's The Last Pomegranate Tree.

Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine based in New York City. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely distributed during the 20th century and has had many notable editors-in-chief.

James Debens, Senior Digital Content Editor at Newsweek Magazine, picked The Last Pomegranate Tree as his favourite book for 2025.

"After being held in a desert prison for 21 years, a Peshmerga fighter in Iraq desperately searches for his son, on a quest guided by memory and myth in this imaginative novel, translated from the Kurdish original," Debens said about the book. "It presents weighty, emotional issues with a deft and poetic touch. "

The Last Pomegranate Tree is an extraordinary chronicle of war and an occult story of love between a father and his son from one of Iraq’s most celebrated contemporary writers.

So begins Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate, a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict.

Muzafar-i Subhdam, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, Muzafar begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region.

An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths, The Last Pomegranate interrogates the origins and reverberations of atrocity. It also probes, with a graceful intelligence, unforgettable acts of mercy.

Bachtyar Ali (also spelt Bakhtiyar Ali) is one of the most prominent contemporary authors and poets from Iraqi Kurdistan. He has written over 40 books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including 12 novels, and has been translated into Kurmanji Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, German, Italian, French, English, and other languages, a renown very few authors writing in the Kurdish language enjoy. In 2017, he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize, joining past recipients such as Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood and Javier Marías. He is the first author writing in a non-European language to do so. In 2005, the Ministry of Culture of Iraqi Kurdistan elected the novel Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan (The City of the Musicians in White) as the best book of the year. In 2009, Ali received the first HARDI Literature Prize, part of the largest cultural festival in the Kurdish part of Iraq. In 2014, he was also awarded the newly established Sherko Bekas Literature Prize.



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