| Muhamad Tawfiq Ali is an author and trilingual translator between Kurdish, Arabic and English. He was born in 1941 in Iraqi Kurdistan, where schooling was in Kurdish (Sorani) and in Arabic at primary and secondary levels respectively. His tertiary education and training in the UK were in Civil Engineering, with postgraduate Diplomas in Linguistics and English/Arabic translation. Since 1958, he has lived mostly in the UK, mainly in London. Now retired, he devotes himself to his lifelong interest in translation, with varied involvement in literature, culture, linguistics and politics. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (MCIL) and he is on the editorial committee of Exiled Writers Ink (literature) and the management committee of the Enheduanna Society’s project, ‘ZIPANG: Discover Mesopotamia through Storytelling’. His Kurdish-English translations have appeared in Iraqi Poetry Today: Modern Poetry in Translation 19 (2003) and he has sub-edited a Kurdish (Sorani) translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2007). His Arabic-English translations include: Hadi Al-Alewi, Children of Kurdistan, I disclaim my nationality (1988); Letter from a Kurdish Woman (1988); A. R. Aboud, The Kurds are God's bothered, bewitched and bewildered people (1988); and poems by Ahmad Matar and others. His main Kurdish-Arabic translation is Goran, Kurdistan’s Immortal Poet, (a short biography and selected poems, 1990). His translations into English also include reviews of Kurdish Culture and Identity (1996); and among his original writings are: Sanctions on Iraq: flow charts and explanatory texts (1997); Iraq: War or Dictatorship (2003); and Middle East Political Equations and Trigonometry, or Political Engineering: diagrams, formulae and explanatory texts (1997).
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