Dunya Mikhail 
Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad. She fled her country after being placed on Saddam Hussein's list of enemies. She has published four collections of poetry in Arabic and one in English, including The Psalms of Absence, Almost Music and The War Works Hard. In 2001, she won the U.N. Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.
Links to other texts about Dunya Mikhail
Interview
National Public Radio's Morning Edition presented a radio program featuring Dunya Mikhail on June 6, 2007.
In conversation with Renée Montagne of NPR, Mikhail said, "When I think of war, for me, it's by default a ... lose-lose case. I believe there's no winner in the war because, you know, the killed one dies physically and the killer dies morally. So they are both dead." Listen to Mikhail read her poems on this NPR website, which is part of a series on "War and Literature."
Critical Review
This review by Laurence Lieberman originally appeared in 2008 in the American Poetry Review.
"Any reader of the most compelling war poetry of our epoch may readily discern a marked shift in perspective between the best verse dealing with the World Wars or Vietnam and Dunya Mikhail's major lyrics grappling with the succession of wars in Iraq to which she has borne personal witness, ranging from the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) to the current war. Dating back to her earliest anti-war writings--four poetry volumes plus the seminal Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, a 'lyrical multigenre text'--her most salient message has been unwavering. There are no winners. Both sides, in whatever war, lose big. There are no true heroes, true martyrs. Only losers. She virtually never takes sides, except against the wars. Hence the remarkable power and effortless fluency of her new book's riveting title poem, The War Works Hard..."
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