Hasan Namir : part one

Hasan Namir was born in Iraq in 1987. He graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA in English and received the Ying Chen Creative Writing Student Award. He is the author of God in Pink (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction and was chosen as one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 by The Globe and Mail. His work has also been featured on Huffington Post, Shaw TV, Airbnb, and in the film God in Pink: A Documentary. His latest book is War / Torn (Book*hug Press, 2018). Hasan lives with his husband in Vancouver.

Photo credit: Tarn Khare.

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Growing up, I was writing poems that would rhyme at the end, sometimes lyrical. I perceived poetry as words that had to flow and rhyme with each other. Then, when I enrolled in English 472 – Advanced Poetry at Simon Fraser University, my whole perception of poetry was questioned and revolutionized. I veered away from rhyming and my poems all became free verse. I started to experiment with form and words to give new meaning. Now, my poetry writing has continued to be experimental with the form complimenting the words and themes.