Kawa Nemir (born 29 May 1974, IÃÂdir, Turkey) is a Kurdish writer and translator of English language works into the Kurdish language. His translations include Ulysses by James Joyce and the play Hamlet of William Shakespeare. He was also the editor-in-chief of the Kurdish literary magazine Jiyana Rewà Âen.
He was born in 1974 in IÃÂdir into an upper-class family and attended schools for primary education both in IÃÂdir and Istanbul. According to an interview published in Voice of America, he was faced with assimilation and denial of the Kurdish nation in school. After he studied English language and literature at the Universities Hacettepe and Istanbul he also studied Ancient Greek at the University of Istanbul until 2002. He did not like several of his friends join the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which fight against the Turkish Army but chose to become a writer. In the early 2000s he moved to Diyarbakñr.
Since 1997 Nemir was the editor-in-chief of a prominent cultural and literary magazine in the Kurdish language, the Jiyana Rewà Âen. Under his lead, the magazine published fifty-two issues on a monthly basis until 2003. In 2012, his translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet premiered in the RAST theatre of Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was the first Kurdish adaption of Hamlet. and was later staged on several locations and occasions by the Municipally City Theatre of Diyarbakir. In 2019, his translation of Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca premiered in the Amsterdam City theatre. Besides having translated many classics of Greek and Roman literature into the Kurdish language, he is also playwright and has adapted the Kurdish classic Mem u Zin by Ehmedê Xhanî for theatre.