Kurdish singer Khaliqi to receive prestigious award in Sweden

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — This year’s Mamle Center for Culture and Art award will be given to the renowned Kurdish singer from eastern Kurdistan, Mazhari Khaliqi. The award ceremony will be held in Stockholm in late May, the center has announced.

  
The award is due to be given to Khaliqi on May 21 in a ceremony which is expected to be attended by several other artists and writers.
 
Artists, such as Azeez Sharokhi, Qala Mara and Abas Kamandi are among those who have received the Mamle Award in the past.
 

Khaliqi is one of the most famous Kurdish singers and his art crosses all borders of Kurdistan. He hasn’t released any albums since the early 1990s but his older songs and videos are still broadcast on Kurdish TV and radio stations on a daily basis.

 
Khaliqi was born in 1938 in eastern Kurdistan’s city of Sina. He became interested in art early on during his primary education. He learned Persian music and Solfech under the supervision of Rostam Muqaadas. He then became a teacher at an intermediate school in 1957 in the city of Saqiz for some time.
 
Khaliqi left Sina in 1958 to begin his studies. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Tehran University, and then later his Master’s degree in Industrial Management.
 

He returned to southern Kurdistan in 1983 and began working for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s (PUK) media center in the Sargul-Bargalu area. He later moved to the United Kingdom.

 

Khaliqi went back to southern Kurdistan in 2002 and opened the Adane Center in the city of Sulaimani, which was later turned into the Kurdish Cultural Institute.