Winter in Northern Iraq by Andrew Dimitri
ABOUT THE BOOK
Winter in Northern Iraq
A collection of 30 poems by Andrew Dimitri
£10 (GBP) Hippocrates Press
ISBN 978-0-9935911-5-0
Publication date: 17th May, 2019
Read the Guardian poem of the week article by Carol Rumens about It Will Make a Fine Hospital
Watch Andrew Dimitri interviewed by Donald Singer
Watch recordings of readings from the book during the Poems to Live for session on poetry from conflict areas on UK National Poetry Day - 1st October 2020
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE COLLECTION
Dr Andrew Dimitri
For the past decade, Sydney physician Andrew Dimitri has spent substantial periods working with Médecins sans Frontières in some of the most complex and challenging regions of the world. In early 2017 he was tasked with the oversight of a new MSF hospital on the fringe of Mosul, while the battle to oust Isis was still raging only a short distance away. These poems are his record of what he saw and the people he met amid the ruins, their injuries, their stories, their traumas.
It Will Make a Fine Hospital took second prize in the 2017 Hippocrates Prize and was widely seen when it was chosen as a Poem of the Week in The Guardian. Commenting on it there, Carol Rumens found that Dimitri’s plain diction, casual syntax, laconic tone, and balance of irony and hope, impeccably expressed the complexity of the experience. Now Winter in Northern Iraq makes available all thirty poems written by Andrew Dimitri out of his own encounter with a region ravaged by tragedy. With the author’s pragmatic compassion and his understated determination to make a difference, these poems resist despair and generate the grounds for hope.