“Mummy, I want a storybook,” the little girl kept asking. She was
walking with her mother in one of the parks of Kurdistan’s capital
Erbil. The mother answered that she did not need it, and from the way
she was talking it was clear she did not really understand what her
daughter wanted or why.
That little scene is so abnormal in the Kurdistan Region that it keeps
popping up in my mind. A little girl, asking for a book to read whilst
walking in a park. In a country where reading is in no way promoted at
school, where most schools hardly even have libraries, and where many
mothers, like the little girl’s, have not learned to understand the
value of books.
In this case, the girl must have seen the book shop outside the park’s
gate, another abnormality in a country where most people buy their books
at book fairs—the main place for publishers to sell.
A country also where most publishers ask the author to pay for the
publishing of his book, as I found out when I tried to get one of mine
published recently. Or where in the best possible case, the translator
will be paid, but not the writer.
Read the whole story here
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