Building on the theories of ‘world literature,’ especially R. L. Walkowitz’s notion of ‘born translated’ fiction, this study investigates the politics and poetics of “born-translated” Anglophone fiction by Kurdish authors in the last two decades. Reading a number of texts by Laleh Khadivi, Kae Bahar, and Ava Homa, we argue that these narratives employ similar techniques, each in its own way, to articulate their international, yet local, significance. While the study traces major and minor differences, it also demonstrates the existence of a set of formal, structural, and thematic resemblances across these diverse, sometimes incongruous, texts. Partial fluency, self-translation, limited participation, multiculturalism and manipulation of linguistic and geographic organizational structures, along with the collectivities attached to them, are among the elements that identify these narratives as transnational. They are shaped in accordance to the dominant expectations of international readers and while there are many traces of and references to the source culture and the sociopolitical conditions of the homeland, much care has been taken to appeal to international audiences. There is, accordingly, a dialectic of the local and global operating in these texts.
