Kamiran, the thirteen-year-old boy who narrates Jan Dost's novel "Safe Corridor" swings between acting like a grown man and a helpless child. He still has trouble controlling his bladder and steals his sister's nappies to hide it. The Kurdish teen and his family move from city to city in 2018, in search of a "safe corridor" to flee the fighting in northern Syria.

But he matures at an unnatural speed—the boy who wets himself at night has a sexual relationship with a widowed neighbour during the day. Throughout their journey, Kamiran's skin grows chalky and hard, as though he were ageing years at a time. In this coming-of-age story, war sets the boy's biological clock askew: time seems to race forward and backwards simultaneously.

"Wars heighten our awareness of tragedy," Dost said, in exchanges over email. "And children, because of their extreme sensitivity, grow up quickly in wars. They are still children, but their awareness is greater than their age."

In the last decade, Dost's literary oeuvre has been reshaped by war. "Safe Corridor", his first novel to be translated into English, is one of five recent novels he has set around war in northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. Several of these books, he says, are based on the experiences of his own family. 

Writing in Arabic, writing in Kurdish

Dost was born in the city of Kobanî (Ayn al-Arab in Arabic), northern Syria, and raised in a multilingual Kurdish family with a keen love of books. His older brother studied Arabic literature and wrote poetry, while his younger brother, who also wrote poetry, studied English literature. His mother, he said, memorised classical Kurdish poems "and would always recite them to me."

Throughout his career, Dost has shifted between writing in Arabic and Kurdish. He wrote his first Arabic poem at ten, and his first publication came at 14 when he sent several humorous poems to a literary programme on Damascus Radio, which ran under a pseudonym.

He started writing in Kurdish the following year, and he said his relationship with Kurdish is different from his relationship with Arabic. "The authorities fought against Kurdish, besieged it, did not allow it to flourish," he said. "We struggled a lot, and we were subjected to a lot of harassment and book confiscations, and yet still we insisted on writing in Kurdish."

"We wrote novels and poetry collections in our mother tongue without ever studying it at school or university," Dost said. "It’s what I call a shadow literature." And yet, despite his commitment to Kurdish, Dost has continued to write in Arabic as well. "With these two languages, I am ​​like a piece of iron caught between two magnets," he said. "Each of them has a tremendous force of attraction."

Writing war

Dost moved to Germany in 2000 and published his first novel, "Mijabad", four years later. This book, which is set around the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan (January -December 1946), was written in Kurdish. He has now written more than a dozen novels in both Arabic and Kurdish. Since 2012, he has joined many Syrian writers—Samar Yazbek, Dima Wannous, Khaled Khalifah, and others—in contributing to an urgent literature of war.

In 2013, Dost published his first novel grappling with the country's civil war: "Blood on the Minaret". And, as the situation grew increasingly dire—with Daesh forces taking over his hometown—he wrote "Kobani", published in Kurdish in 2017 and Arabic in 2018. His Arabic novel "They Wait for Dawn" (2022) is set around the 2015 destruction of Kurdish cities in Turkey. The twinned novels "Safe Corridor" and "A Green Bus Leaving Aleppo", both published in Arabic in 2019, chronicle events in northern Syria in the years just before it was published.

"A Green Bus Leaving Aleppo" is set before the events of his award-winning "Safe Corridor". It centres on an elderly man who remains alone after his family has been torn apart by the war. "The novel ended," Dost said, but "its chapters continued to unfold on the ground as the Kurdish city of Afrin was attacked by Arab factions linked to Turkey. It was a great tragedy. The population was displaced, and there was a large exodus, killings, and destruction."

At the time of this attack on Afrin, Dost said, many of the characters in "A Green Bus Leaving Aleppo" were still in the city. He could not just leave them there. "So, I decided that the novel had to continue, to shed more light on this Syrian family—which is part of my real family. As a result, the novel 'Safe Corridor' appeared."

As the novel begins and ends, rain is bucketing down, threatening to sweep away Kamiran's rickety tent shelter. This vulnerability echoes throughout the novel, in which the overwhelmed Kamiran tries to navigate unpredictable terrain, while external forces threaten to snatch up everything around him and wash it away.

Through the eyes of a child

Seeing the events of 2017-18 through a young teen's eyes brings everything into sharper relief. Events that an adult might be inured to, or might try to ignore, Kamiran sees with fresh and wounded clarity. 

When a "Party bigwig" comes to the refugee camp where his family is staying, Kamiran is as interested in his "big moustaches and his paralysed hand" as he is in the man's politics. As the people are "chanting grand slogans and applauding," Kamiran turns to his uncle, who explains, despairingly, "The biggest calamity is when you don’t have any idea just how gigantic your calamity is."

For Dost, writing this novel from a child's point of view was not easy. "It was a difficult choice to make the narrator a young boy. He curses war with ugly words and expresses his hatred of battles in a childish language that contains the anger of the innocent. I had to embody his personality, his language, his curses."

Kamiran's naivete allows him to question things like party politics and the meaning of a "safe corridor." It also means he can focus on sights an adult might look away from, like the piles of human faeces along an evacuation route packed with refugees.

Awards and readers

Thus far, there has been little international attention focused on Dost's powerful novels.

"Safe Corridor" won the inaugural Bait Ghasham Dar Arab Prize in Marilyn Booth's translation in 2024, and as a result will now be published in English. The translation was launched during a two-day symposium in February that celebrated the prize’s 2025 winner. In a sign of his increasing recognition, another of his novels, "The French Prisoner", was longlisted for the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. 

"Awards play a very important role in promoting any novel," Dost said. "I hope to win at least one prestigious award so that my novels can take their rightful place." Without the stamp of a prize, he added, “good fiction is lost to what you might call the publishing chaos.”

Either way, Dost continues to write feverishly in both Kurdish and Arabic. The war has changed his relationship to Kurdish, he said, as he got "angry with my language and with the Kurds who committed the massacre" at Amuda in 2013. But he continues to tell his stories in both languages.

In early February, he sent the Kurdish version of his latest novel, "The General in his Last Battle", to his publisher in Istanbul and it is scheduled for publication in Kurdish this fall. "The Arabic translation, which I did myself, will be published by Dar An-Nahar in Lebanon." The novel returns to some of the themes of his debut, tracing the life of Kurdish general Mulla Mustafa Barzani (1903-1979), and will be available in Arabic in the Spring of 2026.

Safe Corridor
Jan Dost (trans. Marilyn Booth)
DarArab, 2025 (forthcoming)