AGRI ISMAÏL is a Kurdish author based in Sweden who has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

His work has been published in The White Review, The Rumpus, Guernica, Asymptote, and The Lifted Brow among other places. He is on the editorial board of the Swedish journal Glänta and an assistant editor at the British visual literary journal Short Fiction.

His piece HAUNTED HOME won the 2016 Stack award for best non-fiction and he was longlisted for the 2017/2018 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize for THE OUTPOST. His debut novel HYPER was published in spring 2024 by Chatto & Windus (UK) and Albert Bonniers Förlag (SE).

Agent: Erik Larsson

Nominated for the August Prize 2024!

A family saga set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, spanning two generations and three continents, HYPER is the story of a Kurdish family torn apart by migration. 

When Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness.  

Agri Ismaïl’s unforgettable debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq’s children and their increasingly desperate relationship to money. Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai. Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector. Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.

The siblings are so distant from one another that they no longer even share the same language: Siver’s world is presented in sparse fragments of contemporary auto-fiction, freely jumping from past to present; Mohammed’s in a hysterical realism reflecting London after the stock market crash; and Laika’s in a kinetic prose that emulates the speed and rhythms of the internet, a new topic always a click away.

At once a love letter to the systems novel and a subversion of the family saga, HYPER uses the unsettled nature of the Kurdish diaspora to capture the dislocations of life under capitalism. It calls to mind the doomed efforts of the outsider tying to succeed within western capitalism of Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the life within the internet of Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, and the shifting perspective of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad with the thematics of The Candy House.

REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS

"A hell of an accomplishment from an author who looks to be at the start of a brilliant career. A bitter yet compassionate tour de force."
Kirkus, starred review 

“Ismaïl’s characterizations of all three siblings are deliciously perceptive and painfully tense. Cutting and self-assured, this heralds the arrival of a thrilling new voice in the vein of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith.”
Publishers Weekly

“(…) both a rich novel of ideas and a moving family saga (…) Ismaïl ‘portrays engaging characters with emotional acuity and simultaneously evokes the hyperreality of life in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” 
Times Literary Supplement

“It’s a brilliant conceit, and this is a book of big, heady ideas: how 20th-century concepts of communism and solidarity have been run through the digital shredder of the 21st century; how technological change has made refugees out of all of us, as we hide our true selves from the digital panopticon; how tyrannies both political and personal can be infinitely strengthened by the endless freedom the modern world provides.”
The Guardian 

“A grand family epic over four hundred pages that moves between decades and generations (…) It is funny, deeply touching, sad, and thrilling – a kind of multi-layered and multi-perspective portrayal of exile that I have never read in Swedish before (...) Agri Ismaïl masters the novel form like few debutants are able to do. Across over four hundred pages, he never loses focus, sharpness, or pace; it is masterful. I would like to call HYPER a masterpiece.”
Expressen

“I would be surprised if HYPER is not nominated for several debut awards as well as the August Prize this year. Rarely has a Swedish debut novel been so tightly narrated with a clear idea, without ever losing the human perspective on the characters. With precision, Agri Ismaïl depicts how the siblings are all trapped in the capitalist system and how money affects their dreams and desires down to the smallest detail. I am deeply impressed by this family portrait, that manages to encompass both capital, identity, exile, and humanity.”
Borås Tidning 

“Thoughts go to post-colonial star authors like Zadie Smith; the same tonally present and sharp criticism of power is embedded in an expansive narrative (...) The truly great thing is how HYPER shows the tightly interwoven ties between the international financial market and post-colonial power structures, with migration as one of its most tangible consequences (...) a captivating and striking story about people and capital and the sick mechanisms that govern all our lives.”
Svenska Dagbladet

“It is a page-turner for bibliophiles, this (...) Everything is so upsetting and so sad. HYPER is a lament for a capitalist system that devours itself, and thus erases so many of us humans here on Earth. We should know better. But, as they say, there seems to be something wrong with us.”
Sydsvenskan

“We never know who makes the actual economic decisions over our heads. Or do we? It is precisely this illusion of the lawlessness of the financial market that debutant Agri Ismaïl portrays in HYPER, a skillfully told, labyrinthine novel where the world is a stage for the more or less visible puppeteers of our time – the stock market sharks, the banks, the algorithms. The book is filled with humorous portrayals of finance novices, anarchists, con artists, eco-activists, cam girls, and defecating penguins.”
Aftonbladet 

“Finally, a great story about human nature and time. At last, something essential is being said in Swedish literature. A pure blessing that Agri Ismail makes his debut with HYPER. The long-awaited epic novel that at once makes us feel at home and gives us knowledge about the world, about struggle, sorrow, and hope, about a Kurdish family on the world stage, a novel for the era (...) It is about us and our time, with the same universality as a Shakespearean drama.”
Norrbottens-Kuriren

“An intertwined swan song over our suicidal, capitalist present day.”
Göteborgs-Posten

“It is undoubtedly refreshing to read a debut that has so much to say. An interesting and independent book.”
Dagens Nyheter

“It is an interesting process when Ismaïl's novel in my head retroactively grows into something other than I imagined, or maybe even wished for. Instead, an informed criticism of the escalating tyranny of neoliberalism slowly crystallizes.”
ETC

“A thrilling and entertaining family epic.”
Femina

“Lost myself in "Hyper" by @magnitizdat This is a NOVEL in the truest sense. Ambitious, epic, heartfelt, all of it. An emotional tale of three siblings and their struggles to be successful in the modern world, about being an immigrant, about living up to your parents' expectations, about family dynamics, grief, loyalty, guilt (...) but also this riveting journey into the financial crisis from the view of bankers in London to hackers in New York to single mothers in Dubai. Spanning over continents and generations. This is some of the smartest and most interesting storytelling to come out of Scandinavia in a long while. I was blown away.”
Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove

“A tightly stitched work of melancholy wit and rueful irony. Hyper evokes what it feels like to live now: to surf on or surrender to the mercurial waves of global capital.”
Tom Benn, author of Oxblood

“Ambitious and intricate, panoramic in scope yet alive to the intimate details of everyday existence, Hyper marks the arrival of a significant, keenly perceptive new voice in literature.”
Sam Byers, author of Perfidious Albion

“Ismaïl destroys the concept of the ‘international family saga’ by feeding it through the 21st-century capitalist shredder. Funny, tender, ultramodern and brilliant.”
Ruby Cowling, author of The Paradise

“A satire of capitalism, a parable of money, a saga of 'statelessness' and diaspora, and a most heartfelt chronicle of fractured families. Delicious, harrowing, gutting, hilarious, and deeply necessary, Hyper is a masterpiece.”
Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album

PUBLISHERS’ STATEMENTS

“HYPER is one of the most ambitious and impressive debut novels I have ever read. It reminds me of the early systems novels of Don DeLillo, but Agri Ismaïl has invented a global idiom all of his own, ingeniously using the story of a Kurdish family fractured by migration to explore the dislocations of life under capitalism. It calls to mind the work of literary giants as diverse as Mohsin Hamid, Patricia Lockwood, Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith and Viet Thanh Nguyen. We have a stunning cover design featuring a rug by Faig Ahmed that perfectly encapsulates the disentangling of tradition in a contemporary (very online) world. This is both a novel for our times and a novel for all time.”
Kaiya Shang, Chatto & Windus

”Agri Ismaïl’s HYPER is nothing less than a world class first novel. An incredibly absorbing and insanely ambitious novel of ideas – and of the more limited than great expectations of one family – that is rich with political history, social criticism and hypermodern satire. It made me think of novels like Jonathan Franzen’s FREEDOM or Zadie Smith’s WHITE TEETH, but with the edge of Michel Houellebecq or Bret Easton Ellis. Reading it, I couldn’t believe that it was a debut.”
Johanna Haegerström, Albert Bonniers Förlag

"HYPER is a novel about exile – and about money. Agri Ismaïl's impressive, timely debut is shaped by the realities of our globalised world; through the fate of two generations of a Kurdish family, he explores the flows of people and the flows of capital. In doing so, Ismaïl proves to be a great literary talent with a voice all his own, who has succeeded in writing a captivating, beautifully crafted novel with fascinating characters."
Sarah Houtermans, Rowohlt

“A systems novel, an immigrant novel, traces of DeLillo, Franzen? HYPER by Agri Ismaïl is a profound exploration of a family fractured not only by physical distance but also by the crushing weight of political exile and the relentless forces of capitalism. Getting to know Rafiq and Xezal, Mohammed, Siver and Laika, we are timely reminded of the resilience and courage demanded of us all to hold on to the bonds that connect us as humans – including the bonds that make up the greater ‘us’ in today’s world, where modernity’s insatiable demands seem to be able to erode the very connections that define even our humanity. For Bonnier Norsk Forlag, it is a great honour to bring this deeply resonant and contemporary reflection on the human condition to Norwegian readers.”
Marius Hjeldnes, Bonnier Norsk