Kader Abdolah (b. 1954, Iran) studied physics in Teheran and was active in the student resistance. He published two novels about life under the Khomeini regime before fleeing his homeland in 1985. Three years later he came to the Netherlands. He quickly mastered the Dutch language and started writing in it. He debuted with De adelaars (Eagles, 1993), a collection of short stories which earned him the Golden Dog-Ear Award for the best-sold debut of the year. He has since published the short-story collection De meisjes en de partizanen (The Girls and the Partisans, 1995) and the novels De reis van de lege flessen (The Journey of the Empty Bottles, 1997), Spijkerschrift (Cuneiform, 2000), which was awarded the E. du Perron Prize, and Het huis van de moskee (The House of the Mosque, 2006). In 2008 he published De boodschapper (The Messenger), about the prophet Mohammed, and an alternative translation of the Koran underlining a more moderate and ‘human’ Islam. Abdolah’s work has been published in more than 20 languages.
Kader Abdolah is the penname of Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani, an Iranian writer who also writes in Dutch. Abdolah has lived in the Netherlands since 1988.
He studied physics at the Arak College of Science and fled the country as a political refugee in 1988. Today he lives in Delft (The Netherlands), writing under a pseudonym made up of the names of two murdered friends. Het huis van de moskee (The House of the Mosque), catapulted Abdolah into the Dutch bestseller lists.
