Stockholm ICORN City of Refuge welcomes poet and writer Raafat Hekmat
In September 2023, the Swedish capital Stockholm welcomed poet and writer Raafat Hekmat from Syria as the city’s tenth ICORN resident for the period 2023-2025.
Raafat Hekmat is a Syrian poet and writer of short stories. In 2020, he was awarded the Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture for his short story collection As if I Were Dreaming. His latest book Ten Minutes Late for the World was published in 2023 by Dar Al Nahda Al Arabia.
Hekmat’s writings are featured in three anthologies: The Musuem of Rubble- Fear and Isolation, a poetry collection published by Dar Ninawa Damascus in 2019, Witnesses from its People: Stories of the Pandemic, published by Dar Al'an Jordan in 2020, and Decameron- We Narrate for Survival, published by published by Dar Al'an Jordan, also in 2020. In 2022, In Fear of the Hunter was published by the Egyptian General Book Authority in Cairo.
Raafat Hekmat has been a regular contirbutor for the Lebanese website Daraj, writing on Syrian issues under a pseudonym. He also did voice overs in Arabic for National Geographic and other media platforms.
During his ICORN residency in Stockholm, Hekmat plans to continue his literary work and reaching out to both old audiences and finding new ones in Sweden.
Stockholm has been a City of Refuge since 2006 when ICORN was founded. Since then, Sweden’s capital has hosted ten writers, artists and journalists as ICORN residents, including Raafat Hekmat. Some of Stockholm’s previous ICORN residents include Zahra Hussaini, Arya Aramnejad, and Ashraf Atraqchi.
