The Company
Agora Vision was founded to use creative thinking, great designs, and computing advancements to fill a gap in Kurdish and other distinctive literature around the world. It is the legal entity that owns and operates Agora Deng and Agora Voice, both of which are audiobook platforms dedicated to Kurdish and other distinctive literature in the world, in Kurdish and English. Among its product lines are also Agora Pertuk, a channel to make Kurdish books available globally in a digital format using the latest ebook technology and Agora Vision English, an in-house, multilingual translation system dedicated to literature translation.
The Company is officially incorporated in KRG, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq and British Columbia, Canada as Agora Vision Company for Digital Broadcasting and Publishing Ltd. However, it serves a global market.
The Mission
Increasing the impact of Kurdish and other distinctive literature around the world using audiobook apps and digital platforms.
The Vision
Achieving global recognition of Kurdish and other distinctive literature at the level of motion picture productions and awards.
Founder's Message
Sherko Bekas, the great Kurdish poet, wrote that no soil on earth writes as beautifully as ours. I spent years believing that and being unable to prove it to anyone who doesn't read Kurdish.
I'm Hemin Latif. I founded Agora Vision to bring Kurdish literature to English readers. My doctorate is in interaction design and robotics, which is not the usual route into literary publishing, but no one else was doing this, and I stopped waiting.
Seven books so far. The newest is Mardin Ibrahim's The Notebook of Sorrowful Elders, where word goes round that the sickness kills only the old, and the young men start hunting their elders through the streets. Omar Said's The Buried Circles of Babylon, where a dig for a lost Babylonian queen turns up mass graves in patterns no one can explain. Abdulqader Saeed's Sold into the Desert, already carried into Arabic and Persian, reaching English for the first time. Hersh Shekh Omar's Five Watches, in which five cast-off timepieces confess what their owners would not. Bayan Salman's Memoir of Perfume and Fire, a novel that smells of citron and exile. Aram Kakay Falah's Sisyphus: The Boy with Two Hearts, from a writer thirty-five years into a career almost unread outside Kurdish. And Jabar Jamal Gharib's The Fall of the Heavens, which we published knowing it would unsettle readers, because softening it would have been a kind of lie.
Three of these books carry the Anfal campaign inside them. That is not a theme I chose. It is what Kurdish writers have been writing about; the sorrow Bekas said our soil writes better than any other.
Every book is made by a team at Agora Vision. Translators, linguists, editors, and designers all acknowledged inside. I choose the books, I work through the English against the Kurdish, and I answer for the result.
The aim is never a novel that reads as though it were written in English. It's a novel that reads as though it were written in Kurdish, for the whole world to read.
Kurdistan has produced literature the world has not read yet. Changing that is my work.
Follow here for new releases, or search for Agora Vision on Amazon.
Available Books on Amazon
Agora Voice
Agora Voice is the first audiobook platform dedicated to Kurdish and other under-represented cultures from the world for English listeners around the world.
It only records and publishes books that are either written in non-English languages but have been translated into English or written in English by non-English authors, describing their livelihood, culture, sufferings, stories, ..etc of their native culture.
It comes with world-class features and quality contents; contents that otherwise would be entirely hidden from the world.
Why Agora?
Agora is an ancient Greek word that means “a gathering space”. It refers to a central, public space that is the center of bringing different perspectives on life together including thought leaders, merchants, artists, …etc. It was chosen as a name for Agora Vision company for its relevance to the company’s mission as a platform for creating information exchange and its similarity to a central space in Sulaimani, the city that Agora Vision company was founded in.
For more details on the word “agora”, please, check the following Wikipedia page
