Essmat Sophie

Some histories survive in official archives. Others survive because someone refuses to let them disappear.

This belief lies at the heart of Essmat Sophie's literary, academic, and artistic work.

Essmat Sophie (Asima) is a Norwegian–Kurdish novelist, interdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker, translator, and public speaker whose work explores the intersections of literature, memory, statelessness, migration, gender, historical trauma, and cultural survival. Working across fiction, scholarship, film, and translation, she investigates how stories preserve lives, identities, and collective memories that political violence, displacement, and official narratives have often left unheard or erased.

Born and raised in the Kurdish region of Iran, Sophie later lived in the United States before settling in Norway. Living across different languages, cultures, and political realities has profoundly shaped both her scholarship and her creative practice. Rather than viewing literature solely as artistic expression, she approaches storytelling as a form of cultural memory and historical witnessing.

Her academic work brings together comparative literature, memory studies, feminist theory, trauma studies, migration studies, archive studies, and Kurdish studies. She holds a Master's degree in English Literature (American and British Studies) from the University of Oslo and a Master's degree in Information Science from Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research examines literature, public institutions, and cultural memory as spaces where identities, histories, and communities are negotiated, preserved, and transmitted across generations.

Her master's thesis in English Literature, Rememory and Counter-Archive, explores how literature functions as a counter-archive capable of preserving histories excluded from official narratives, while her earlier research in Information Science, Public Libraries as a Meeting Place for Immigrant Women, later developed into the peer-reviewed article "Public Libraries: A Meeting Place for Immigrant Women?", published in Library & Information Science Research (ScienceDirect). Together, these projects reflect a continuing interest in memory, belonging, migration, cultural participation, and the preservation of marginalized voices.

These same questions shape her literary work.

Her novel Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Above Ruins explores memory, Kurdish history, statelessness, exile, women's lives, intergenerational trauma, and cultural survival through multiple generations and intertwined narrative voices. The novel later inspired the internationally recognised animated short film of the same title, which she wrote, directed, and produced.

Her short-story collection Last Day of Autumn examines displacement, identity, migration, and the emotional landscapes of exile, while her poetry collection In the Eye of the Storm received Norway's Ordknappen Literary Award for its contribution to intercultural literature.

Sophie's short story "Setar on the Mud Wall" appears in Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora, published by the University of Arkansas Press, an anthology bringing together Kurdish women and nonbinary writers from across the world.

Translation forms another important dimension of her work. She has translated books, literary texts, and poetry between Kurdish, Persian, Norwegian, and English, including Women's Journey from Shadow to Light and selected poems by the renowned Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas. For Sophie, translation is not merely the transfer of language but the transmission of memory, culture, and lived experience across borders.

Alongside her writing and research, Sophie has received international recognition as a filmmaker. Her animated adaptation of Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Above Ruins has been honoured at numerous international film festivals, reflecting her broader commitment to exploring memory, resistance, and cultural survival through visual storytelling.

Beyond her creative and academic work, Sophie regularly lectures at universities, literary festivals, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions, speaking on literature, memory, women's rights, Kurdish history, migration, freedom of expression, storytelling, and cultural transmission. Her work seeks to bridge scholarship and public dialogue while demonstrating how literature can contribute to historical understanding, democratic participation, and intercultural exchange.

Across novels, research, translation, film, and public engagement, Sophie's work is united by a single conviction:

Stories do not merely reflect history. They preserve what history cannot always contain.