Nazand Begikhani

Dr. Nazand Begikhani is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Gender and Violence Research, University of Bristol. She has over 20 years’ experience in research, writing, advocacy for human rights and consultancy, publishing widely on gender and ethnicity, violence against women and honour-based violence (HBV) in English, Kurdish and French. She addressed, among many conferences, the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN’s meeting with the World March of Women 2000, and Sweden’s International Conference on Honour Killings (2004). She has provided expert advice and training on gender equality and HBV to government bodies, UN agencies, and international organisations, including the Swedish government, the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq, UN Women in Iraq, the UK Metropolitan Police and Amnesty International.

She previously sat on the High Commission to Monitor Violence Against Women in Kurdistan, and is currently a senior international advisor to Kurdistan Region’s Prime Minister on higher education and gender, and a member of the Kurdistan’s Women’s Rights Monitoring Board. Dr Begikhani is a poet of international renown with five poetry collections in Kurdish and one in English, Bells of Speech (Ambit, 2006). In 2000, she was awarded the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for her work on HBV, and, in 2012, the French Simone Landrey’s Feminine Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Le lendemain d’hier. Her forthcoming book (with Gill & Hague) is titled ‘Honour-Based Violence: Experiences and Counter-Strategies in Iraqi Kurdistan and the UK Kurdish Diaspora’ (Ashgate, 2014).