Abbas Boskany grew up in Sulaimani in Southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq). He became involved in poetry and theatre in high school, intending to become a poet-performer. However, study at the Academy of Fine Arts was restricted at that time to members of the Ba'ath party, so Boskany studied civil engineering at the Institute of Technology. At the time of the Kuwait invasion in 1990, Boskany was working on a military project involved in dam construction and, as Kurds were being sent to the front line, he fled to the mountains from where he crossed into Turkey. There he began writing poetry in earnest. [Adapted from Fire, Snow and Honey, p. 207]
He migrated to Australia in 1992 where he has participated on the editorial board of the magazine Joussour and has edited the Kurdish cultural journal Zeng.
