Dancing Amid Fire Rising Above Ruins

"Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Among Ruins is a visceral but evocative debut novel. Sophie Essmat writes beautifully about all the ways the human spirit fights against trauma and persecution, while fully immersing the reader in Kurdish culture and tradition."

Neema Shah
Award-winning author of Kololo Hill- award-winning author

"This novel follows the captivating journey of a woman's fight for freedom starting in Sanandaj, Iran, and continuing in Turkey and Europe. It offers a unique view on the history of resistance of a forgotten region and people. It is also a deeply psychological account of the complexity of Kurdish women's triple burden to escape political oppression, male domination, as well as living a life of displacement and marginalization. An impressive accomplishment, born out of love and rage, that shows how the personal is always political, especially for a Kurdish woman born in Iran."

Dr. Wendelmoet Hamelink
Author of The sung Home. Narrative, Morality and the Kurdish Nation.

"Essmat Sophie offers up a prescient and lyrically descriptive journey on Kurdishness in the diaspora, where Kurds carry with them the burden of an embodied history that leaves them bound with the trauma and hope for a Kurdistan that they left behind. Friendship, love, and betrayal are woven together and, at times, effectively portrayed through poems and songs in the context of war, gender and ethnic oppressions, activism, and resistance. Her intertwining narratives allow the reader to ponder how the scars from the past can both fuel and hinder the present-while connecting women's liberation and freedom in Iran to our current interpersonal and international eras."

Dr. Thoreau Redcrow
Co-Director of The Kurdish Center for Studies, Globald conflict analyst.

"The title of the novel summarizes the dramatic livelihood of millions of people.
This novel connects past and present, homeland and exile by memories from the pre and past-revolutionary Iran and the Iranian Kurdish movement while the contemporary "woman, life,
freedom" movement points towards the future. "
Sherzad Hassan
Author of Hasar u Sagkani Bawkim (the yard and my father's dogs). One of the most famous Kurdish authors of the last two decades in Kurdistan