“This Tribute by an Irishman”

Abstract Alan Ward, an Irishman newly graduated from Oxford, arrived in Diyarbakir in the autumn of 1960 to teach at an elite high school. Within four months of his stay, though, he was deported from Turkey due to his interest in Kurdish. Back in Europe, he wrote a poem about the Kurds and Diyarbakir in the Occitan language, with the title La Còrda Roja (The Red Rope) in reference to Kurds hanged under the Turkish state. Discovered by Kurdish solidarity movements in the mid-1960s, he was drawn into Kurdish language and literature studies and produced several works, part of which have remained unpublished in archives. This article introduces Alan Ward as a little-known protagonist of the Kurdology of the 1960s based on both published and unpublished works authored by him as well as his correspondence with Silvio van Rooy, the founder of the International Society Kurdistan.