Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

HASSAN

Danish poet Yahya Hassan dead at 24

Danish-Palestinian bad-boy poet Yahya Hassan, who stormed on to Denmark's literary scene in 2013 and quickly became a household name, has died aged just 24, his publisher said Thursday.

Published: 30 April 2020 19:27 CEST
Danish poet Yahya Hassan dead at 24
Yahya Hassan giving a reading last year. Photo: Ida Guldbaek Arentsen / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP
The exact cause of his death on Wednesday has not been made public but police said they did not believe it was a criminal act.
   
“Twenty-four years. That's nothing, this is a catastrophe,” Simon Pasternak, head of publisher Gyldendal, said in an Instagram post. “I have known him, since he was 16 years, this brilliant boy with enormous talent.”
   
Police in Aarhus, the country's second largest city where Hassan lived, told local media that they had responded to reports of the death of a man in his mid-20s.
   
“Currently there is nothing in our investigation that indicates that this is a criminal act,” police spokesman Jakob Christiansen told newspaper BT.   
 
Hassan's debut poetry collection was printed in a record 120,000 copies after it was released in 2013, in a country where poetry collections are usually printed in the hundreds.
 
   
Writing in all capital letters without any punctuation, he used street slang and blunt word play to deliver a damning indictment of his parents' generation of immigrants who came to Denmark in the 1980s, describing domestic violence, benefit fraud and religious hypocrisy on the Aarhus housing estate where he grew up.
   
In the poem “Satellite dish” he wrote: “WE HAD NO DANISH CHANNELS/WE HAD AL JAZEERA … WE HAD NO PLANS/BECAUSE ALLAH HAD PLANS FOR US.”   
 
“Yahya insisted on not bending to anyone, he didn't want to be anyone's representative… He wanted to be himself,” Pasternak said.
   
Many young Danes of immigrant origin disliked Hassan for his negative views on their communities and their religion. In November 2013, he was assaulted in Copenhagen's main train station by a 24-year-old man previously convicted of trying to commit an act of terror.
   
In November 2019, Hassan released a follow up poetry collection, which like the first was named after himself, also to critical acclaim.
   
In between, he made headlines more for his rantings, his attempts to enter politics and his dealings with justice than for the quality of his writing.   
 
In 2016, he was sentenced to one year and nine months in prison for shooting a 17-year-old boy with a pistol, wounding the boy's foot and leg.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

SOMALIA

‘Strip new Somali PM of his Norwegian passport’: Progress

Norway’s anti-immigration Progress Party has called for Somalia’s new Prime Minister to be stripped of his Norwegian passport, arguing that a country’s leader should not have multiple nationalities.

Published: 24 February 2017 15:57 CET
'Strip new Somali PM of his Norwegian passport': Progress
Hassan Ali Khaire gave a video address after his appointment. Photo: Mraazaa/Wikimedia Commons
Somalia's new President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo, announced Hassan Ali Khaire's appointment over Twitter on Thursday, just a day after he was inaugurated. 
 
Khaire, 46, who came to Norway as a refugee in the late 80s, has like most of his compatriots taken advantage of an exemption Norway gives Somalis from its ban on dual citizenship. 
 
Mazyar Keshvari, the Progress Party’s immigration spokesman has argued that Khaire's appointment as his country's leader removed any justification for his dual citizenship. 
 
“He should be deprived of his Norwegian passport,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.  “A country's prime minister cannot have multiple nationalities. If conflicts occur, where they will their loyalties lie?” 
 
The appointment of Khaire, who has degrees from the University of Oslo and the University of Edinburgh, marks a major step forward in Somalia’s attempt to establish a functioning government following 25 years of civil war and failed government. 
 
Khaire, a former regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council and later an executive with London’s Soma Oil and Gas, is seen as a capable administrator. 
 
But Keshvari suggested it might be time to end the special treatment of Somali citizens, particularly those who take senior positions in the country’s emerging government. 
 
“When someone has been appointed a Member of Parliament and even the Prime Minister of Somalia, we have to assume that they are Somali nationals,” he said.  
 
“The fact that he has now become Prime Minister clearly shows that his need for protection should be seen as temporary and not permanent in nature.” 
 
Dual citizenship is permitted by most countries in Europe, including Norway’s neighbours Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, but it is banned in Norway. 
 
Norway’s Green Party has proposed that Norway follow Denmark, which passed a dual citizenship bill in December 2014.
 
In February 2016, a leaked memo sent by a UN watchdog to diplomats in the UK and Norway, revealed that Khaire was under investigation by UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) for possible ties to extremist groups in East Africa, including al-Shabaab. 
 
The SFO's enquiry was closed in December 2016, 
 
“The SFO has concluded, based on the information and material we have obtained, that there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction,” an SFO spokesman told the Daily Telegraph.