The Centre for Kurdish Studies benefits from Exeter’s large specialist library collections on the Middle East, and from the presence of AWDU (the Arab World Documentation Unit), which also contains many items of interest to Kurdish specialists.
Omar Sheikhmous has generously donated his personal archives to the University of Exeter including, among others, books, PhD thesis, pamphlets, journals and magazines. We are currently in the process of archiving and cataloguing them. Thanks to his generous gift the library of Exeter started to build a collection of more than 150 rare Kurdish newspapers and journals (published both in Europe and the Middle East).
The CKS is pursuing its strategy of building up the collection of Kurdish and Kurdish-related titles. We have a comprehensive policy of acquiring books on the subject in Western and Middle-Eastern languages (English, Arabic, French and German are particularly well covered). We have recently acquired almost all Kurdish titles published in Turkey over the past decades. This collection includes in particular contemporary literature, Kurdish language teaching materials, novels, poetry and short stories published in Kurmanji. Our collection of books recently published in Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan is also growing.
In addition, we have also acquired a collection of over 700 titles from the former Soviet Union, which includes not only the principal works of the major Soviet Kurdish novelists, but also many scholarly books in Kurdish, Armenian and Russian. Exeter now has the most extensive collection of Kurdish material from the former Soviet Union in a European university.
Search the Library catalogue using selected keywords to access Kurdish works, filtering by Kurdish language if required. Note that Kurdish works may be shelved in a number of classmark locations.
These website offer useful resources for Kurdish studies if you are looking for additional material: Kurdistan press , Serxwebun, World Digital Library and DengeKurdistan.