Arab Shamilov

Who was Arab Shamilov?

Arab Shamilov was a Kurdish novelist. He was born in the city of Kars in a Yazidi family in present-day north-eastern Turkey. During the 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 Armenia's communist party. In 1931, he began working on the Kurdish literature at the Oriental Institute of Leningrad. He assisted in developing a Latin alphabet for the Kurdish language and became a member of the editorial board of the Kurdish newspaper Riya Teze, published in Yerevan from 1930 to 1937. In Lenningrad, he also met Qenatê Kurdo and published his work as a document about Kurdish language in Armenia. His first and most celebrated novel, Kurdish Shepherd, was published in 1935. In 1937, he was exiled by Joseph Stalin and was allowed to return to Armenia only after 19 years in 1956 following Stalin's death. In 1959, he published his first Kurdish novel titled Jiyana Bextewer. In 1966, he published a historical novel called "Dimdim" inspired by the old Kurdish folk tale of Kela Dimdimê which has been translated into Italian as well. Two operas have been written in Italian based on his novels, Il pastore curdo and Il castello di Dimdim. In 1967, he published a collection of Kurdish folk stories in Moscow.