Essmat Sophie
Dans I Flammer Over Ruinene
Dans i Flammer over Ruinene by Essmat Sophie. Published by PenBridge Press- Translated by Gelayoul Salamelahi- This is the Norwegian edition of Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Above Ruins, a powerful literary novel that weaves memory, exile, trauma, and resistance into an intimate and poetic narrative. Blending lyrical language with political urgency, the novel stands at the intersection of literature, testimony, and feminist resistance. Set between Kurdistan, Iran, Turkey, and Northern Europe, the story follows Tara—a Kurdish woman living in exile—as she navigates grief, political violence, and the long shadows of revolution. Through fragmented timelines and interwoven voices, the narrative moves between personal loss and collective history, revealing how women’s bodies and memories become sites of resistance under patriarchy, state violence, war, and displacement. Rooted in Kurdish culture and oral tradition, yet written with a universal literary sensibility, the novel explores the psychological aftermath of political trauma and the inheritance of pain across generations. At its heart, this is a story of survival, remembrance, and the quiet defiance of women who refuse erasure. It speaks to readers of literary fiction, feminist narratives, postcolonial literature, and stories of exile—offering a rare and deeply human perspective on a region and a people too often rendered invisible
Dans I Flammer Over Ruinene
PRAISE FOR DANS I FLAMMER OVER RUINENE
“Dans i Flammer over Ruinene by Essmat Sophie is a poetic and powerful novel about destruction, resistance, and hope. Through intimate and deeply human portrayals, the novel explores how love, memory, and dignity can endure amid war and loss. This is a story about rising again when everything seems lost — a warm and deeply moving work that profoundly touches the reader.”
— Prof. Dr. Haci Akman
Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Bergen
Author of Statløs i diaspora: Kulturarvdokumentasjon og virtuelt museum
“The Kurds are the largest people in the world without their own state. They have a long history of persecution, struggle for freedom, and efforts to preserve their identity — yet this history is largely absent from Western news coverage. It is difficult to understand why. Like Scandinavians, Kurdish life, culture, and traditions are deeply rooted in nature and territory. We should therefore be able to understand their struggle for identity and existence. Essmat Sophie’s book takes us into Kurdish history — displacement, exile, and flight — rendered in a personal and poetic voice, yet at the same time realistic and immediate.
This book offers an insight we otherwise would not have access to.”
— Terje Bjøranger- Norwegian author and former police prosecutor
Author of Den tredje søsteren og Den ingen ser
“Sophie’s novel offers a deeply personal and intimate insight into Kurdish life and culture. The narrative moves back and forth in time and space between Kurdistan and Europe. From exile in Norway, the narrator reflects on her upbringing in the Kurdish cities of Sanandaj and Marivan, where first the Shah and later Khomeini’s Islamists used every means to erase Kurdish identity — and where Kurdish women stood at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”
— Jan B. Vindheim
Norwegian author and the author of the book Kurdistan stiger fram og Påfuglengelens folk
“Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Above Ruins is a visceral but evocative debut novel. Sophie Essmat writes beautifully about all the ways the human spirit fights against trauma and persecution, while fully immersing the reader in Kurdish culture and tradition.”
​Neema Shah/ Award-winning author of Kololo Hill- award-winning author in London
“This novel follows the captivating journey of a woman’s fight for freedom, starting in Sanandaj, Iran, and continuing in Turkey and Europe. It offers a unique view on the history of resistance of a forgotten region and its people. It is also a deeply psychological account of the complexity of Kurdish women’s triple burden to escape political oppression, male domination, as well as living a life of displacement and marginalization. An impressive accomplishment, born out of love and rage, that shows how the personal is always political, especially for a Kurdish woman born in Iran.”
​Dr. Wendelmoet Hamelink/ Author of The Sung Home. Narrative, Morality and the Kurdish Nation. Researcher at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Oslo.
"Sophie offers up a prescient and lyrically descriptive journey on Kurdishness in the diaspora, where Kurds carry with them the burden of an embodied history that leaves them bound with the trauma and hope for a Kurdistan that they left behind. Her intertwining narratives allow the reader to ponder how the scars from the past can both fuel and hinder the present—while connecting women’s liberation and freedom in Iran to our current interpersonal and international eras.”
— Dr. Thoreau Redcrow/ Co-Director of The Kurdish Center for Studies, Global Conflict Analyst in the United States
“The title of the novel summarizes the dramatic livelihood of millions of people.
This novel connects past and present, homeland and exile by memories from the pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and the Iranian Kurdish movement, while the contemporary “woman, life,
freedom” movement points towards the future. “
Sherzad Hassan/ Author of Hasar u Sagkani Bawkim (the yard and my father’s dogs). One of the most famous Kurdish authors of the last two decades in Kurdistan.
“Using both a personal and national lens to tell a story of identity and revolution, Essmat Sophie’s _Dancing Amid Fire_ is at once a sprawling look at the Kurdish struggle to be given voice, and a tightly crafted tale of one woman’s personal and political turmoil. Assured in its prose and rich in historical and cultural detail, Sophie’s novel is a window into a world too readily ignored by the sweep of history. A book not to be missed.”
Dr. Michael Matheson. Canadian Writer, Editor, and feminist activist
