Kiwi-Kurdish Singer Nouri Reimagines Silent Night To Support Refugees This Christmas

Kiwi-Kurdish singer Nouri is releasing a deeply personal version of Silent Night this Christmas to support Aotearoa New Zealand for UNHCR, helping refugees and displaced families facing winter without adequate warmth or shelter. This is her special gift of hope, strength and love.

Nouri is available for media interviews and in-studio performances of Silent Night in the lead-up to and following the release.

Nouri has reimagined Silent Night as a lullaby, sung by a refugee mother to her child. For the 33-year-old singer, it’s deeply personal. She was once a baby girl in a refugee camp, cradled in her mother’s arms.

Born in Syria after her family fled conflict in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Nouri spent three years in the camp before her family received humanitarian visas to resettle in Aotearoa.

She recorded the song while thinking about her mother, and the extraordinary lengths she went to give her children safety, hope and a sense of home.

“She even made a tent feel like home and full of love,” says Nouri.

The family arrived in New Zealand with very little. Nouri remembers going to school with plastic bags instead of a school bag. Music became her way of finding her feet, building confidence and eventually forging an international career.

Her musical achievements include a New Zealand Hot 20 chart-topping debut single, Where Do We Go From Here, which spent 10 weeks on the Billboard charts, performing the US national anthem at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and appearing on the soundtrack to Daddy’s Home 2.

“It’s like, wow, I get to talk about my mum’s story, which I’ve always wanted to talk about, but in a way that I know how, which is a song,” she says.

The release supports Aotearoa New Zealand for UNHCR, the New Zealand partner of the UN Refugee Agency, which works around the world to protect and assist people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution.

This Christmas, UNHCR’s fundraising campaign is focused on helping families facing freezing temperatures in places including Ukraine and Afghanistan. For people living in tents, damaged homes or inadequate shelter, winter can make an already precarious situation even more difficult. Donations help provide essential winter assistance, including warmth and shelter.

For Nouri, making the song is also a way to pass on the kindness her own family received. “Coming as refugees meant we had a chance to live. And we got a chance to dream.”

“It’s strangers helping strangers. It’s through compassion and it’s through love and that does travel so far, beyond borders, beyond race, beyond religion, beyond everything.”