Kurdish scholar and intellectual Shamo Sali was born in the village of Susz in the Ottoman region of Kars in a family belonging to the Yazidi-Dasti sheikhs. He first spent his life as a shepherd and later went to study in the village of Alexandrov. Before the October Revolution of 1917, he was imprisoned by the Russian authorities.
After the revolution, he moved to Stav Roppel in the North Caucasus and joined the Bolshevik Party. In 1920-1924 he graduated from the Oriental Institute in Moscow and later became a representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia in Yerevan.
In 1930 he became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Reya Taze, which was published in Latin script until 1938, when it was converted to Russian Slavic script. He began his higher education in Leningrad in 1932 and his doctoral thesis was supposed to be about Kurds and Kurdish intellectuals, but he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and Stalin's regime and exiled to Siberia for 20 years.
In 1946, he married a Russian girl in Siberia. After Stalin's death, he returned to Yerevan and devoted himself to literature and writing. Despite his first attempt in the 1920s to establish a Kurdish alphabet based on the Latin alphabet, he published most of his writings in Soviet magazines and newspapers.
His works include Kurdish Shepherd (Shivani Kurd) in 1930, Breakfast (Barbang) in 1957, Happy Life (Zhiyani Bakhtawar) in 1959, and Kurds of Armenia in 1961.
This great Kurdish writer passed away in 1978.[1]