Kooshyar Karimi – June 14 2020

World Refugee Day – June 20

Kooshyar and his family were granted a political refugee visa to Australia by the UNHCR. Eleven years old when the Iranian Islamic Revolution took place, Kooshyar pursued his education through to medical school. He went on to become a published author, award-winning translator, doctor, husband and father by the age of 26. Kooshyar is now an Australian citizen, fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, a member of the Australian Society of Cosmetic Medicine, and member of the Skin Cancer Society of Australia and New Zealand. He practices medicine full-time and writes in his spare time. His latest book is Journey of a Thousand Storms: A refugee’s story.

I Confess: Revelations in Exile
Wild Dingo Press, 2012; ISBN 9780987178503
This is a gripping, previously untold story, which throws a chill light on the secrets and lies that flourish in the fertile soil of dehumanising beliefs and practices – in this case in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a memoir by Sydney-based doctor and writer/translator, Kooshyar Karimi, who in 2000 managed to flee, with his family, escaping certain torture and death which stalked him on a daily basis in his native Iran. Karimi’s sin was his Jewishness and the fact that he helped desperate girls and women, who had been raped, terminate the resulting pregnancies.

Leila’s Secret
Penguin Australia, 2015; ISBN 9781743485224
Twenty-two year old Leila lives in the strictest of families in sharia-law Iran. Intelligent and passionate, she yearns to go to university but her family will not allow it. Her trips to the library the local orphanage are among the few outings she’s allowed. As Leila returns home one day, she comes upon the handsome owner of a clothes store, and her fate is sealed. Leila’s Secret is told in two voices, Leila’s and Kooshyar Karimi’s. These two extraordinary stories are compelling, haunting, heartbreaking, and for all the tragedy of their substance, also paradoxically, beautifully uplifting. Kooshyar Karimi writes with the depth of his immense compassion, and the reader finishes his book the larger for having read it.