45 minutes | Sunday, 22 January 2023
‘Life Begins In Leitrim : From Kurdistan to Croke Park’ is Zak Moradi’s autobiography.
The former intercounty hurler joined Ed on The Sunday Show to tell us his story of being born in a refugee camp and how he and his family ended up travelling from Iraq to Carrick-on-Shannon, and then settled in Tallaght. He played everything, but hurling was his one true faith. “I loved playing,” he says. “There was a lot of skill in it. I used to have a hurl in my hand every day. A sliotar was like a friend you were bringing somewhere with you. Even though most of the lads in school were more football, I was just more into hurling. I don’t know what it was. I just liked the game.”
He went back himself to Zahaw in 2015 after his father died, suffering the heat like a tourist. “I was showering three times a day,” he recalls. “I was sweating that much. You go out and you just nearly melt.” Meeting his grandparents again, discovering a village filled with cousins, revived by their return. It will always remain a place tangled in emotion. Ireland is home, but his roots are there.
The book was nominated in the Best Irish Sports Book category at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards.