Dr. Nazand Begikhani, author and poet, is a visiting professor at the University of Cienspo in France, and a senior researcher and honorary member of the Center for Gender and Violence Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.
Dr. Nazand was born in 1964 in Koya. She completed her primary and secondary education in the same city. From 1983 to 1987, she studied English language and literature at the University of Mosul.
Dr. Nazand Begikhani was born into a struggling and poor family. Under the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, several members of his family were imprisoned and subjected to Anfal and deportation. Two of her brothers, Nihad and Nawzad, were executed in Ba'ath prisons, and her third brother was tragically martyred in Germany. She herself participated in school events and conferences with patriotic poems since high school and became a place of security surveillance and accountability. In 1982, she was arrested during demonstrations in Koya, imprisoned and tortured. In 1987, she was forced to emigrate to Denmark because of her political position. She crossed the borders of Iran, Turkey and Bulgaria on foot. She has lived in refugee camps in (Denmark, France, UK).
In 1989, she received a scholarship from the French government through the Kurdish Institute in Paris to complete her studies at the Sorbonne University. She completed her master's and doctorate at the Sorbonne University in France. Her doctoral thesis was entitled “The Image of Kurdish Women in European Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” and was awarded her the highest honorary degree in 1997.
Dr. Nazand Begikhani is an international Kurdish poet. In addition to Kurdish, she also writes in English and French and participates annually in international poetry festivals and conferences. She has six books of poetry in Kurdish and three in English and French. In 2012, her book Yesterday and Tomorrow won the Simone Landry Feminist Poetry Prize.
$Dr. Begikhani has been awarded several Kurdish and international prizes in the fields of poetry, gender equality and crimes of honor, including:$
1. Emma Humphries Award for Activism and Fight Against Crime on the Grounds of Honor (2000),
2. Simone Landry, French Feminist Poetry Prize (2012),
3. Sayed Ibrahim Award for all his works (2009),
4. Kurdistan Gender Equality Award (2015),
5. Kurdish Celebrities Award, Kurdistan University, Sina (2019).
6. French Vincent Wright Prize in the form of an academic chair at the University of Cienspo/Paris (2019/2020).[1]