Faraj Bayrakdar (Arabic: فرج بيرقدار; born 1951 in Tir Maaleh near Homs, Syria) is a Swedish-Syrian poet and writer.

Bayrakdar began writing poetry during his school years and started a short-lived literary magazine with his friends while studying Arabic literature at Damascus University.

The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury wrote an introductory essay, calling this collection "one of the instruments of pressure on the Syrian authorities to mobilize international, intellectual opinion, particularly in France, in order to set the poet free.

[7] A Dove in Free Flight, only published in English nineteen years later, was first translated into French in 2012 by the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laabi, also a former political prisoner in his home country.

[8] Inspired by Schubert's Winterreise, Swedish composer Svante Henryson set several of Bayrakdar's poems to music.