On Thursday evening Banipal magazine of modern Arabic literature and the Arab British Centre jointly held the first-ever open evening of BALMAL - the Banipal Arab British Centre Library of Modern Arab Literature. BALMAL is located in the Arab British Centre at 1 Gough Square - just off Fleet Street, and next door to the historic Dr Johnson's House.

The Arab British Centre's Communications Manager Ruba Asfahani said it was great to see so  many people eager to use the library. She and a trustee of the Centre, Palestinian-British filmmaker Said Taji Farouky, signed up new BALMAL members in the course of the evening. Life membership is £10, which is ploughed back into  maintenance and development of the library. The evening included a book sale, with prices ranging from £1 to £12.

The guests were invited to give their feedback on the event. Asfahani explained that the idea behind the  open evening was to find out whether people would like the opportunity to use the library outside of the Arab British Centre's office hours. If this proved to be the case, such evenings could become a regular event.

The guest speaker of the evening was the translator and journalist Jonathan Wright, who this year won both of the major translation prizes open to translators of Arabic literature. In January he was joint winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Egyptian writer Youssef Ziedan's novel Azazeel (Atlantic Books, 2012). In May, Wright and Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Wright's translation of Blasim's short story collection The Iraqi Christ (Comma Press, 2013).


Wright is currently one of the four judges of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize 2014: the books, all of them novels, in contention for this year's prize are on display in the BALMAL library. The judges are currently drawing up individual shortlists in preparation for their meeting later this month to agree a winner. The winner will be announced in February.


BALMAL's roots go back to the 2008 London Book Fair when, for the first-time ever, the Fair had the Arab World as its Market Focus. During the Fair Banipal collaborated with LBF organisers over a display of books donated by publishers. This display became the foundation stone of BALMAL, which was formally opened at a reception in January 2010 - the day after the award ceremony of the 2009 Saif Ghobash Banipal Arabic Literary Translation Prize (won by Samah Selim for her translation of The Collar and the Bracelet by the late Egyptian author Yahya Taher Abdullah).

The evening was introduced by Banipal's publisher and cofounder Margaret Obank. She described Jonathan Wright as "a fantastic translator of a very wide range of Arabic literature, from Taxi [by Egyptian writer Khaled Al Khamissi] to Azazeel, toJudgement Day [by Lebanese author Rasha al Ameer]."

Jonathan Wright praised BALMAL as a great resource, with 600 works of Arabic literature in translation within its total collection of 2,000 works on the Middle East. BALMAL's literary collection comes via Banipal, "the magazine which has been at the forefront of promoting Arabic literature in English since  1998, 16 years now. Margaret Obank and her husband Samuel Shimon have been introducing Arabic writers to the world and introducing the world to Arabic authors ever since then, and the literary scene would be very much the poorer without them."

Wright noted that over the period Banipal has been publishing there have been big changes in the world of Arabic literary translation. "There has been a steady increase in the flow. In the 1990s only two to eight literary works a year were coming into English from Arabic. That rose to between 10 and 16 in the first decade of this millennium and then up to 26 in 2009. This time the Banipal prize, which I'm judging, has 19 works of fiction - that's just from one year's publication - which is a very impressive number. I wouldn't say it's the tip of an iceberg - I wouldn't go quite that far - but it's certainly not the whole picture, there are plenty more that didn't make that list."

Wright added that there is a similar pattern in the USA. "In 2013, out of 500 new works of translated literary fiction 30 were from Arabic, which means that Arabic ranked fourth in the world's languages, after French, German and Spanish. So Arabic really is way ahead of other languages, way ahead of Italian, for example, and Russian, languages that you might expect to be much higher."


Wright said there are all sorts of reasons why this matters of course, including cultural exchange, common  humanity, learning about each other, finding out about other countries and so on. But there is also the malign side: "It's often noted that some books are chosen maybe to reinforce prejudices, and many of the books have veiled women on the covers, or scary looking men. In parallel there has been a massive increase in the teaching of Arabic in Western universities but there is of course also a malign side to that because a lot of people who learn Arabic end up listening to your phone calls."

Referring to his personal experiences, Wright presented an eloquent case for the reading and translation of Arab literature. "I was a journalist for 30 years mainly in the Middle East for Reuters news agency and I travelled widely: I think the only Arab country I never went to was Mauritania.  I met thousands of people, interviewed them, sat in their homes, drank tea, heard them make speeches in public and so on, and I really thought that I was quite knowledgeable and that I was familiar with the fabric of society, and of course I read the newspapers, and I watched television.


"Eventually I became somewhat dissatisfied with the journalistic way of life because it is a little superficial and you're very much driven by deadlines, you don't have time to dig very deep. Then I gradually discovered literature, and I realised that literature was a very good channel for discovering more about other countries and the way people live. Of course it's subjective, and not the whole truth, but in a way that's its strength because it is a very intimate and a very authentic immediate voice that sticks in your mind in a way that other forms of information do not. And if it's coupled with alternative representations of reality from other authors then it really does build up a picture that is very rounded and quite deep.

"For the last couple of years I've been dealing with quite a few Iraqi authors.  I used to go to Iraq occasionally, not for long periods of time,  but I really feel that now I have a much better feeling for Iraq than I ever had from visiting and walking around and speaking to people, because the literature that I've discovered is highly condensed, it's distilled experience, people have put their whole lives into these pages. So after reading people like Hasssan Blasim and Ahmed Saadawi and Sinan Antoon and so on I feel that I know Iraq much better than I would have done by reading the New York Times or the Guardian or watching Al Jazeera.



Wright added: "I mentioned this to some of my journalistic colleagues and many of them agreed with me and said that, yes, they find reading literature does add another dimension. Of course I'm not suggesting that we should stop reading newspapers - and if you want to find out what Iraqi oil production was in 1960 probably literature is not the place to go. But I was reminded of literature as a source of socioeconomic data when I was reading Thomas Picketty's book on capitalism, and he starts off by talking about Jane Austen novels and Balzac, and  how their characters perceived the social structure around them, and socioeconomic reality that they lived. No amount of graphs or economic statistics could give you the same sense that you get when you read Jane Austen or Balzac on how their characters saw their place in society. And there are plenty of other examples of people who've used literature as a means for analysing social attitudes and so on - Edward Said for example, and even Max Weber. So that's how I see the value of literature: may it thrive, and may you go on reading."

report and photos by Susannah Tarbush

لندن في قلب الحرب على الإرهاب قد تغيـّر عدداً من قوانينها below is the original English text of article published in Al-Hayat newspaper on 18 November 2012 in Arabic translation

by Susannah Tarbush, London

The rise of ISIL (known also by the Arabic acronym Dai’ish) in Iraq and Syria, and its declaration of a caliphate state in the area it controls, has added an alarming new dimension to the long-standing problem of Islamist extremism and terror in the UK.

There is anxiety both over the direct participation of young British Muslims who have joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, and over the radicalising impact on some young British Muslims of its massive propaganda effort on the social media to publicise its gains and attract recruits to its cause. IS has urged its followers to carry out attacks wherever, and in whatever way, they can.

The police and the security service MI5 have warned senior British ministers that the scale of terrorist activity within the UK is now so big that a terror attack is “almost inevitable”. This follows the increase in the terror level in the UK at the end of August to “severe” because of the threat associated with Da’ish.


An estimated 500 to 600 British Muslims have been out to Syria to fight with IS  and other Islamist groups. About half of them are thought to have returned to the UK. But as they return, others travel out to Syria.

The passports of some Britons seen as Islamist extremists have been confiscated to prevent them travelling to Syria or elsewhere. Home Secretary Theresa May has used the “royal prerogative” to withdraw passports 23 times in the 12 months to August 2014.

But there was intense embarrassment for the government authorities when it was revealed on 11 November that one of the most outspoken public supporters of Da’ish in the UK, Abu Rumaysah, had fled the UK with his family 24 hours after being ordered by a court to surrender his passport as a bail condition. He failed to surrender his passport, and is thought to be in Syria in the area controlled by IS.

Abu Rumaysah (a Hindu convert to Islam, originally named Siddhartha Dhar), had been arrested on 25 September along with eight other men including the notorious Anjem Choudary. Choudary jointly led Al-Muhajiroun with Syrian Omar Bakri Mohammad before it was banned in 2005, and he remains an influence on certain young Muslims. Individuals associated with Choudary have been involved in several terror plots over the years, but although he continually makes inflammatory statements in support of terror, and has been arrested several times, he remains at liberty.

The head of Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said recently that at least five Britons a week are travelling to Iraq and Syria to join Da’ish. He added that so far this year, 218 arrests for terrorist offences have been made, an increase of about 70 per cent on three years ago. “A large part of this increased arrest rate is due to terrorist activities, plots and planning linked to Syria. The trend is, I think, set to continue.”

 So far around 30 British jihadists are known to have been killed fighting in Syria and Iraq; the true figure is likely to be higher than this. In addition to the young men going out to fight in Syria and Iraq, British Muslim teenagers and young women are going out, often to marry jihadi fighters.

Because of the heightened threat from terrorism, security was extremely high on the annual Remembrance Sunday, this year on 9 November, at the military parade during which the Queen and politicians laid wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall, near parliament.


In a separate alleged plot, four young Muslim men from West London were charged in mid-October with intending to commit acts of terrorism. They were said to have sworn allegiance to Da’ish and to have plotted a terror attack on soldiers or police in London. A fifth man was charged with transferring a Baikal handgun and ammunition.

Britain has already experienced the devastating effects of Islamist terrorism. On 7 July 2005 four suicide bombers killed 52 innocent people in attacks on the London underground system and a bus. Three of the four suicide bombers were British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin. And on 22 May 2013 British soldier Lee Rigby was killed in broad daylight in a London street by two young Nigerian men who had been brought up as Christians but converted to Islam. They ran him over in a car and tried to cut his head off.


The widespread use of beheading in Syria and Iraq is characteristic of Da’ish’s terror, and some Britons have played a part in this. A tall hooded man dressed in black and speaking English with a London accent has been has been seen in videos on different occasions since August beheading American hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff, then Britons David Haines, and Alan Henning, and most recently American Muslim convert Abdul Rahman – or Peter – Kassig. This apparently British beheader has been nicknamed by the media “Jihadi John”.


The first suicide bombing by a Briton in Iraq was recently carried out by Kabir Ahmed, known as Abu Sumayyah al-Britani, from the northern English city of Derby. He had served a jail term in the UK for saying gays should be put to death. Ahmed carried out a suicide attack on behalf of Da’ish in the town of Biaji, killing a senior Iraqi police official and seven other police officers. Abdul Waheed Majeed, the first British suicide bomber in Syria, blew himself up in February when he drove a lorry packed with explosives into a jail in Aleppo.

 In trying to deal with the threat of terror related to Islamic State the government has to decide what to do about those jihdais who have returned or want to return, as well as trying to deter those who plan to go out to join IS.

After Da’ish’s beheading of the American hostage James Foley on around 19 August, and the raising of the UK’s terror threat, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to MPs to introduce tough new anti-terror laws. 

On 13 November, during a speech to the Australian parliament in Canberra, Cameron unveiled the measures that will be included in a new anti-terror bill. The government intended to publish the bill by the end of November and to rush it through parliament so that it becomes law by the end of January.

Under the proposed new anti-terror law, suspected jihadis returning from Syria or Iraq will be prevented - under new “Temporary Exclusion Orders” - from returning to Britain for at least two years - unless they agree to face a court trial, home detention, or police monitoring, or to go on a “deradicalisation” course.

If they do not agree to these conditions, their passports will be cancelled and their names will be put on a “no fly” list to prevent them returning. “Airlines that don’t comply with our no-fly lists or security screening measures will be prevented from landing in the UK,” Cameron declared. Jihadis who try to enter Britain in secret will face a five-year jail term under a new criminal offence.

The police will also have the power to seize for 30 days the passports of those people it suspects of intending to travel abroad to fight in Syria or Iraq. But these proposed measures in the anti-terrorism bill are highly controversial, and there are concerns that they are not compatible with existing laws on human rights, immigration and citizenship. For example, refusing to allow British jihadis to return to the UK could be seen as making them stateless, which is illegal under British and international law.

The Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says “much more” needs to be done to prevent radicalisation and said the government should force all returning jihadis to go through a deradicalisation process.

Deradicalisation programmes are designed to prevent or reverse radicalisation but there are doubts over how effective they really are. One main deradicalisation programme is the Channel programme which is part of the Preventing Violent Extremism strategy, known as “Prevent”, introduced by the Labour government after the London suicide bombings of July 2005.

The Channel programme aims to identifying those at risk of engaging in violent extremism and to support them, primarily through community-based interventions, challenging their extremist beliefs. But it is under-funded and can hardly cope with the growing demand on its resources. Between April 2007 and March this year nearly 4,000 people were referred to Channel. Currently, around 50 people a week are being referred to deradicalisation programmes.

The uncertainly in recent weeks over how jihadis will be treated when they return to the UK is making some of them reluctant to come back. It was reported recently that up to 100 British jihadis who had left Syria were stranded in Turkey, scared to come home. Dai’ish had apparently taken the passports of some.


Some observers are adamant that jihadis should never be allowed back into Britain. On a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 series The World Tonight, Colonel Richard Kemp a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan said: “We have to assume that having got blood on their hands they could well come and carry out acts of terrorism against us. The best thing is that they don’t get a chance.

Kemp adds: “Why should we spend our taxes on putting them in front of a court and putting them in prison, or spending vast amounts of money on deradicalisation, or on surveillance? The best thing is they don’t come back.”

But Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) disagrees. “We need to consider the lessons of history. What happened after [the war against the Soviets] in Afghanistan in the 1980s was that people were not allowed to go back to their own countries. A lot of Middle Eastern countries were taking passports away, and threatening really severe repression to the ‘Afghan Arabs’ who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

These 'Afghan Arabs' were trapped in Afghanistan, and “they went on to other battle fronts, they formed international networks out of which eventually Al-Qaeda emerged.”

During the prolonged Israeli assault on Gaza this summer, the  presenter of the BBC Radio 4 weekday news programme The World At One Ed Stourton interviewed Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris about his book Gaza: A History (C Hurst and Co Publishers Ltd). The French original of the book was published in France by Fayard in 2012 as Histoire de Gaza . John King has made an excellent job of translating the book into English for the the Hurst edition.

Stourton asked Professor Filiu about the importance of tunnels to besieged Gaza. The tunnels Stourton had in mind were not those constructed by Hamas, but the tunnels used at various times in history, beginning with Alexander the Great's siege and destruction of the city of Gaza in 332 BC.

"The tunnels were one of the main features of Gaza at that time", Filiu said. In his book he describes the tunnels and counter-tunnels of Alexander's Greeks and of the locals under the leadership of Batis, known as "the King of Gaza". After Gaza fell, all those suspected of having fought were slaughtered and their families sold into slavery. "Batis, who refused to kneel before the conqueror, was bound to Alexander's chariot after having his legs broken, and his body was then dragged in agony below the ramparts of the defeated city. The sack of Gaza filled six ships with booty to be send back to Macedon."


Ed Stourton observed that Gaza has had "a very warlike history" with all "sorts of people going through there, fighting, from Alexander to Boneparte, to the British including General Allenby in the First World War, Ariel Sharon, President Nasser ...."

Filiu said the historical pattern has changed dramatically since 1948. "Until 1948, Gaza was a crossroads that any empire in the Middle East who wanted to conquer Egypt had to gain, or that any empire controlling Egypt had to take over in order to open and break through to the Middle East."

But after 1948, when the Egyptians took what is now called the Gaza Strip under their protection and administration, "Gaza became a dead end where basically Israel and the Palestinians started to fight the war they are still fighting today. And so it has to be reopened, this space, to give a horizon for peace and for the people." In 1948 the 80,000 people in Gaza, were joined by 200,000 refugees. The  proportion of refugees is roughly similar today: "Among the 1,800,000 inhabitants of Gaza today, two thirds are refugees."

Although Gaza has become a powerful symbol for Palestinians, while writing his history Filiu was "quite puzzled to discover how little some Palestinians know about the history of Gaza; they’ve been focused on Jerusalem, on the diaspora, on the refugee camps." 

Filiu writes in his foreword of the many difficulties and methodological problems he faced in writing a history of Gaza. Parts of the local archives have been destroyed during numerous conflicts, while other parts have been moved out of Gaza and are the object of wrangling between Fatah and Hamas. Filiu sought to overcome the deficiency of local information by conducting a series of interviews, and by gaining access to a substantial number of unpublished documents. Security constraints were also a problem.

A further constraint is Hamas's policy of promulgating an "official history" of Gaza. This "spuriously credits the Muslim Brotherhood with a continuous existence in a position of pre-eminence over the last seventy years, which suggests that the Brothers had always been in the vanguard and at the heart of the Palestinian national struggle." Such claims tend to withhold credit from the other Palestinian factions, and in particular from Fatah.

"The perspective of history provides the ability to reinterpret these often tenuous and biased accounts of Gaza's history: and as Hamas's intention is to reinforce its dominant position now and in the longer term, much is at stake."

In addition to his position at Sciences Po, Professor Filiu has held visiting professorships at both Columbia University and Georgetown University. His book The Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2012) was awarded the main prize by the French History Association. His books and articles on the Arab world have been published in a dozen languages. His book on Gaza is claimed to be the first comprehensive history of Gaza in any language.

The book's jacket well describes its contents: "Through its millennium–long existence, Gaza has often been bitterly disputed while simultaneously and paradoxically enduring prolonged neglect. Squeezed between the Negev and Sinai deserts on the one hand and the Mediterranean Sea on the other, Gaza was contested by the Pharaohs, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Fatimids, the Mamluks, the Crusaders and the Ottomans. Napoleon had to secure it in 1799 to launch his failed campaign on Palestine. In 1917, the British Empire fought for months to conquer Gaza, before establishing its mandate on Palestine.


"In 1948, 200,000 Palestinians sought refuge in Gaza, a marginal area neither Israel nor Egypt wanted. Palestinian nationalism grew there, and Gaza has since found itself at the heart of Palestinian history. It is in Gaza that the fedayeen movement arose from the ruins of Arab nationalism. It is in Gaza that the 1967 Israeli occupation was repeatedly challenged, until the outbreak of the 1987 intifada. And it is in Gaza, in 2007, that the dream of Palestinian statehood appeared to have been shattered by the split between Fatah and Hamas. The endurance of Gaza and the Palestinians make the publication of this history both timely and significant."

Although Filiu's book reaches far back in Gaza's history, his main emphasis is on the modern era. The book's first section, "Gaza Before the Strip", comprises three chapters. The first examines its position as the crossroads of empires, the second the Islamic Era, and the third the British Mandate.

The book's remaining three main sections each covers a 20-year period:  "1947-67: The Generation of Mourning"; "1967-87: The Generation of Dispossession", and "1987-2007: the Generation of  the Intifadas". Filiu ends his history with "Conclusion: The Generation of Impasses?"

Filiu's history is written with admirable clarity and draws on a wide variety of sources, including Gaza rap group Palestinian Rapperz (PR) The author provides numerous references and an extensive bibliography. In addition, he helpfully provides 16 pages of biographies of many of the protagonists in the modern history of Gaza. All in all, Gaza: A History merits a prominent place in any library of works on Palestine.
Susannah Tarbush, London

Saudi writer Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's prizewinning 2009 novel Where Pigeons Don't Fly  is to be published on 4 December by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) in Roger Moger's translation from Arabic to English. Al-Mohaimeed, who was born in Riyadh in 1964, has a reputation for provoking controversy with his novels and short stories set in Saudi Arabia. His work has sometimes been banned, and much of it has been published outside Saudi Arabia.

Where Pigeons Don't Fly continues Al-Mohaimeed's literary interrogation of Saudi society. It is uncompromising in its portrayal of the obstacles facing the younger generation, and the stultifying grip of religious extremism. And it depicts many kinds of sexual activity, from sexting and same-sex attraction, to details of passion snatched in cars or in the improvised equivalents of "love  hotels".

Al-Mohaimeed's works have been translated into several  languages, including Russian, Italian, Spanish and German. Two of his novels have previously been published in English translations by Anthony Calderbank. The English version of the 2003 novel Wolves of the Crescent Moon was published by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, and by Penguin, in 2007, and the 2004 work Munira's Bottle  by AUC Press in 2010.

Where Pigeons Don't Fly was originally published in Arabic in 2009 by the Arab Cultural Centre in Beirut, under the title Alhamam La Yatiru Fi Buraida (Pigeons Don't Fly in Buraida), and became a bestseller. It won the Abu al-Qasim Ashabbi Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2011. The original title alludes to Fahd's childhood memory of "velvety" pigeons in his uncle's yard in Buraida, scuttling on red legs while pursued by his boy cousins. "They dashed about, flapping their clipped wings..."  Pigeons and feathers recur as symbols in the narrative. 

The novel is written in a flowing poetic style, rendered pleasingly into English by Robin Moger's lively translation. Though dealing with urgent, serious issues, it is an absorbing and entertaining read, full of humanity and often touched with humour.

The novel opens with its central character, Fahd al-Safeelawi, on a train travelling from London to the coastal town of Great Yarmouth in the county of Norfolk. It is July 2007 and the young Saudi has been taking a two-day break in London from his exhausting job at a print and copy shop in Great Yarmouth.

Fahd is a talented artist, whose paintings were exhibited in Saudi Arabia. The novel he has chosen to read on his  train journey is Elizabeth Hickey's The Painted Kiss on the relationship between the Viennese painter Gustave Klimt and his young lover Emilie, whose name he uttered as he died.

Fahd turns his attention to his mobile phone and on a whim dials the phone number in Saudi Arabic of Saeed, his closest friend from his childhood and "shameless, wild youth" in Riyadh. He hears not a dialling tone but a song that seems to wipe away his new life in Great Yarmouth. "At the same instant he was possessed by fear, a terror of the sheikhs - the fat men with long black beards he always saw at night, advancing with sharpened lances with which they pierced his pillow and riddled it with holes, the white feathers flying out until he couldn't breathe, and he would awake in a panic, feeling that he was choking."  Fahd starts to cry, his slender body shaking with a strange hysteria; the elderly Englishwoman sitting opposite him in the train touches his arm and asks if he is all right.

The sheikhs who fill Fahd with such dread are members of the Committee for Virtue and Prevention of Vice who police the lives of young unmarried Saudi men and women. In July 2006 Fahd and his divorcee lover Tarifah were detained by members of the Committee for the "sin" of being together in the family section of a coffee shop.

The novel is unrestrained in its depiction of its characters' love lives and sexual activities. The pursuit of romance by the young in a strictly segregated society, under the eyes of the Committee, is facilitated by the deployment of such tools of modernity as the automobile, internet, mobile phone and shopping mall. Fahd and his girlfriends seek out dark places, or empty apartments, for their encounters, and sometimes pretend to be married.

While it was his relationship with Tarfah, a divorced mother who studies at the Academy for Health Scienes, that led to his detention by the Committee, Fahd also has memories of two other lovers. The first is young, mischievous Noha with whom he had a short liaison. The other is the predatory, older Thuraya, a mother of six in a now sexless marriage. She revels in her carnal adventures with Fahd.  But she eventually starts to pester and virtually stalk him to the point where he wonders if she reported him and Tarfah to the Committee, precipitating their detention.
Susannah Tarbush

 "I hope my readers feel an emotional attachment with the characters and are able to get a glimpse of the disastrous state many families are in. Syrian children had to suddenly wake up one day as adults, and missed an essential part of the growing up experience" says Sumia Sukkar 

from article published in Qantara.de 28 November 2014
 
Translating sights, sounds and feelings into colour
Sumia Sukkar wrote a novel about a young Syrian boy with Asperger Syndrome who paints the horror and violence of the war around him in vivid colour. BBC Radio 4 adapted the novel for its Saturday Drama series. Susannah Tarbush read the book, listened to the radio play and spoke to its young author

The drama "The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War", broadcast recently on BBC Radio 4, was a powerful and moving prelude to a week of special, intensive coverage of the Syrian conflict across BBC radio and TV.

The play was adapted from the debut novel of the same title by British-born Sumia Sukkar, daughter of a Syrian father and Algerian mother. Remarkably, Sukkar was only 21 when the novel was published in hardback in 2013 by London-based independent Eyewear Publishing.



To coincide with the radio drama, the publisher brought out a paperback edition of the novel with a new cover design. The paperback includes an afterword by Laura Guthrie, a Glasgow University PhD student who researches fiction featuring characters with Asperger Syndrome.

 Adam, the central character in Sukkar's novel, is a 14-year-old Syrian with Asperger's, a condition on the autistic spectrum. His mind translates sights, sounds and feelings into colour. He has a talent for painting, in which he engages obsessively.

Through Adam's first-person present-tense narration, Sukkar skilfully conveys his bewildered perceptions of the growing violence and horror around him "Why do you always paint war?" asks his brother Isa. "Because it's filled with endless painting possibilities and the range of colours is so wide," Adam replies. The harsh realities of war

Adam's mother died when he was 11. He lives in Aleppo with his schoolteacher father, older sister Yasmine, and student triplet brothers Khaled, Tariq and Isa. The family is badly impacted by the war. The physical and mental health of Adam's father disintegrates, and his brothers get caught up in the fighting.

Yasmine does her best to keep the family together and to protect Adam. At the same time, she suffers the pain of an impossible love affair. When she is abducted and tortured by militiamen, the first-person narration switches from Adam to her.

Sukkar started writing "The Boy from Aleppo" while reading for a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. Her tutor was the Canadian-British poet, critic and teacher Dr Todd Swift, director and publisher of Eyewear Publishing.

Dr Swift told Qantara.de: "I taught creative writing at Kingston University for seven years and had about a thousand or so students on the BA, MA and PhD levels; Sumia would be in the top three or four of those in terms of talent."

She was a "dedicated, serious, ambitious writer, who took the support I gave her editorially and ran with it. Her novel was completed in less than a year, and her hard work was impressive. She has a great mind for metaphor and surprising detail. I knew when we met she was a born writer."... continuedhere

Review - first published October 2014 in About Larkin issue 38 -  of Fadhil Assultani's Philip Larkin, An Outsider Poet: Transcending Solitude, Sex and the Ordinary(Mira Publishing House, Leeds, UK, 2013), 84pp. £6.60. ISBN 978-1-908509-05-5

by Susannah Tarbush, London

The study Philip Larkin, An Outsider Poet: Transcending Solitude, Sex and the Ordinary by the Iraqi poet, translator and journalist Fadhil Assultani may be the only work on Larkin by an Arab author written and published in recent years in English. Assultani has lived since 1994 in London, where he is head of the cultural department of a leading pan-Arab newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat. He was editor-in-chief of the cultural quarterly Aqwas from 2009–2011, and contributes poems to the independent Iraqi daily Al-Mada"to reach Iraqi readers after so many years of discontinuity with them".

Assultani wrote his Larkin study as the dissertation for an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, London University. Mira Publishing House of Leeds has published the dissertation as an 84-page book. In addition to writing about Larkin, Assultani is one of the few translators of his poems into Arabic. His translations of the poems 'Wants', 'The Literary World', 'New eyes each year' and 'How to Sleep' appear in his compendious anthology Khamsoun Ama min Al-Shi'ir al-Britani 1950–2000 (Fifty Years of British Poetry 1950–2000) published in Damascus in 2008. The anthology contains the work of 56 British poets in Arabic translation. Assultani edited and researched the book, and carried out all the translations. He worked on the anthology on and off for 10 years.


Assultani is a key figure on the lively Arab-British cultural scene. His own poetry has appeared in English translation in publications including Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature, Open Democracy, and Modern Poetry in Translation's March 2003 Iraqi Poetry Today issue, which was the first collection of modern Iraqi poetry to appear in the West. His poems have also been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Kurdish and Persian.

Assultani was born near the city of Hillah, capital of Babylon province, in 1948. That year also marked the birth in Iraq of the modern Arab free verse poetry movement, which Assultani describes as 'the biggest revolution in Arabic poetry for more than 1,000 years'. From Iraq the new poetry movement spread to Lebanon, Egypt and other Arab countries. In classical Arabic poetry, verse is written according to the rules of al-'amud, meaning pillars or columns. 'There is a rhythm in free verse, and rhyme as well, but with different units, not just one unit as in classical Arab poetry,' Assultani says.

There were three major Iraqi pioneers of the free verse movement: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati, and the woman poet Nazik al-Malaika. British and other English-language poets – including T S Eliot, W H Auden, Ezra Pound and Edith Sitwell – were a major influence on the Iraqi poetry movement. Sitwell famously had a profound effect on the poetry of al-Sayyab. Her poem 'Still Falls the Rain' influenced his 1960 poem 'Song of Rain'.

Assultani came of age as a poet in this atmosphere of experimentation with form. He wrote his first poem at the age of 11: 'It was of course about love'. His poetry was first published, in a newspaper literary supplement, when he was 17. He was eager to read the new poetry, and would borrow money to buy the latest issue of Al-Adab literary magazine founded in Beirut in 1953. He was particularly influenced by al-Sayyab, whom he regards as the greatest Arab poet of the 20th century.


Assultani studied English literature at Baghdad University's College of Arts. 'We studied prose and poetry, we studied Eliot, we studied Dylan Thomas, we studied Graham Greene, we studied Henry James and many many more.' After graduation in 1971, he became a journalist on the daily culture page of the Iraqi Communist Party newspaper Tariq al-Shaab (The Way of the People). The editor of the culture page was Saadi Youssef, who turned 80 this year and is regarded as the most famous living Iraqi poet. When Youssef left the newspaper, he recommended that Assultani be appointed in his place.

In 1977 Assultani left Iraq, disillusioned with the Iraqi Communist Party and its policy of joining with the Baath Party in the National Progressive Front. Saddam Hussein was becoming the most powerful man in Iraq and beginning his brutal dictatorship. In 1978, Assultani recalls, 'about 500 Iraqi intellectuals left Iraq – poets, novelists, architects and so on'. Many more left during Iraq's subsequent wars, sanctions and waves of internal repression.

Assultani became an English teacher, first in Morocco and then in Algeria. His poetry was published in Al-Hurriya (Freedom), published in Damascus. Its literary editor was a leading Palestinian poet, Ghassan Zaqtan. Assultani's first poetry collection, entitled simply Poems, was published in 1982 by East and  West Publishing House, set up in London by an Iraqi journalist. In 1985 he moved to live in Damascus, where his second collection, Incomplete Anthem, was published. His third collection Burnt by Water was published in Beirut in 2000. His most recent collection is The Various Colours of the Lady.

The distinguished Iraqi-American author, university teacher and translator Saadi Simawe, who edited the Modern Poetry in Translation Iraqi Poetry Today issue, and has translated some of Assultani's poetry, sees Assultani as part of a new trend in Iraq literature: 'a kind of complex imagination in which existentialism is mixed with humor alongside an unusual compassion for all humans'.

The Iranian author Amir Taheri, a columnist on Asharq al-Awsat, wrote a preface to Assultani's study entitled 'Larkin and Assultani: several points in common'. He writes that Assultani's dissertation 'came to me as a treat', for two reasons: 'First because I have been a fan of Larkin since, as a student in London, I discovered him in the 1960s.' And secondly, 'in the 1990s I had the pleasure of making Fadhil Assultani's friendship which, in turn, gave me the privilege of being among the first readers of his poems as he committed them to paper.'

Taheri says that although they 'hail from different horizons', Larkin and Assultani have several points in common. Both are the product of cultures in which poetry is still of great importance. Taheri recalls that he was surprised in his first encounter with Britain to find that compared to other European countries he knew, including France and Germany, poetry attracted large audiences. And 'one might even claim it was in Iraq, the ancient Mesopotamia, where the epic of Gilgamesh marked the birth of literature as deeply felt human response to the mysteries of existence.' Taheri adds that 'from the start, I saw Larkin's work as a poetical version of chamber music. He is the poet of small touches, fleeting moments, and flashes of insight, the poet of enduring transience as formulated in "Modesties", one of his shortest poems.' For his part, Assultani 'especially in his poems written in the past decade or so, has distanced himself from the epic ambitions of many Arab poets of his generation and moved closer to what René Char called "the small music of life".'

In the introduction to his study, Assultani refers to Colin Wilson's 1956 book The Outsider, which was translated into Arabic soon after its appearance in English, and was received with enthusiasm by Arab readers and writers. Assultani notes that the cultural climate in mid-twentieth century England was not receptive to the techniques of surrealism, nor to the concept of an outsider. Regarding the first, David Gascoyne was something of an exception, and lived for some time in France. Wilson's The Outsider 'tellingly focused on foreign writers, with the exception of T E Lawrence and H G Wells.'

For this reason, perhaps, 'Larkin was not viewed as an outsider, apart from some references to his life as a solitary and a bachelor which has nothing to do with the concept of being an outsider in its philosophical interpretation'. But Larkin was not just a loner or reclusive person: from the beginning, he 'held his own existentialist views on life, art, society, sex, solitude, selfhood and otherness, belonging, uncertainty, self-realization, anxiety and undecidedness'.

Assultani writes: 'For me, Larkin, both as a person and as a poet, is an outsider, in the existentialist sense of the word, and he is in harmony with himself. There aren't two distinct Larkins, or two sides of him, as many of his critics suggest. By making a comparison of his poetry, prose and his personal letters, we can discern coherent views and visions that govern his seemingly contradictory attitudes.' From this perspective, Larkin's work 'forms one protracted poem, in which he meditates on these big issues occupying humanity in the twentieth century'. Larkin's whole persona, 'similar to existentialist outsider characters in modern literature, confronts the issues preoccupying his age, such as consciousness, freedom of choice, human knowledge, and selfhood and otherness in modern societies. Confronting these issues, Larkin's approach is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic.'


Assultani argues that by analysing his early poems, even as far back as the 1930s, and comparing them with his later poems 'we will see that there are coherent existential issues penetrating the poetry from the very beginning'. A sense of alienation from the outside world characterised much of his poetry. In his first published poem 'Winter Nocturne' which appeared in his school magazine the Coventrian in 1938 when he was 16, we find: 'A web of drifting mist o'er wood and wold, / as quiet as death.' And the final line 'Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.' In the 1954 poem 'Places, Loved Ones', published in The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin writes: 'No, I have never found / the place where I could say / This is my proper ground / Here shall I stay.' In his 1979 interview with the Observer he said: 'I do not really notice where I live'. The 1974 poem, 'The Life with a Hole in It', with its 'three-handed struggle has the same theme as 'Wants', written in 1950 and published in The Less Deceived. 'Mr Bleaney' (1955, and published in The Whitsun Weddings) is 'perhaps the most existential poem Larkin ever wrote'.

As regards Larkin's fiction, the protagonists of Larkin's two published novels Jill and A Girl in Winter– John Kemp and Katherine Lind – are outsiders haunted by alienation.

Assultani notes that Terry Whalen wrote in his 1986 book Philip Larkin and English Poetry that Larkin is close to poets such as Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and R S Thomas, sharing with them 'not only the depth and integrity, but also profound doubts, tensions and existential anxieties and, and exploration which are everywhere attentive to bleaker truth and realities of our day'.

Assultani argues that Larkin is closest to R S Thomas. 'It might even be claimed that Larkin shares more themes with Thomas than with any other British poet in the second half of the twentieth century, though their approaches and style have differences.' He adds that 'waiting, absences, death, failure, suffering, echo, shadows, and death are very common vocabularies in their poetic discourse. It seems that both poets echo ideas of Kierkegaard, perhaps unconsciously in the case of Larkin, and consciously with Thomas who read Kierkegaard and dedicated a poem to him.'

They are preoccupied with almost the same existential themes. 'Unlike the secular Larkin, Thomas's approaches to his themes are arguably theological, but his main concern, like Larkin's, is the human condition.' He compares Larkin's 'Church Going' with Thomas's 'In Church'. Assultani's enthusiasm for Larkin and his work suggests that, far from being an insular poet, Larkin transcends boundaries of nationality and language. His poetry has a universal appeal.

Arab Jazz – Book Tour
February 9 @ 7:00 pm - February 11 @ 8:00 pm


The prizewinning French filmmaker and writer Karim Miské visits the UK in the second week of February to celebrate the publication of the English translation of his debut novel Arab Jazz. The translation, by Sam Gordon, is published by Quercus imprint MacLehose Press and is supported by Institut Français du Royaume-Uni in London, English PEN, and Arts Council England.

The novel was first published in French in 2012 as Arab Jazz by Éditions Viviane Hamy. It was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière  

Arab Jazz won a 2014 English PEN award for promotion via the PEN Promotes programme, hence the UK tour. At three events - two in London, one in Oxford - Miské will be in conversation variously with writer and activist Tariq Ali, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, writer, and lecturer Kenan Malik, journalist and Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore and thriller writer Sarah Lotz.

The novel, a literary thriller set amongst Muslim and other immigrant communities in Paris's cosmopolitan 19th arrondissement, could hardly be more topical. Miské told the London-based Independent newspaper: "When I heard about the attack on Charlie Hebdo, I was deeply disturbed like most people. Then I heard how the killers crashed their car at Place du Colonel Fabien and that they had hijacked another car and driven down the Rue Petit – all places which appear in Arab Jazz - I thought what is happening? Why have these people invaded my book?

Miské was born in 1964 in Abidjan to a Mauritanian father and a French mother, and grew up in Paris.  He studied journalism in Dakar and now lives in France where he is a documentary filmmaker on subjects including deafness (for which he learned sign language) and the common roots of the Jewish and Muslim religions.

The publisher of the English translation of Arab Jazz says:
"Kosher sushi, kebabs, a second hand bookshop and a bar: the 19th arrondissement in Paris is a cosmopolitan neighbourhood where multicultural citizens live, love and worship alongside one another. This peace is shattered when Ahmed Taroudant’s melancholy daydreams are interrupted by the blood dripping from his upstairs neighbour’s brutally mutilated corpse.

"The violent murder of Laura Vignole, and the pork joint placed next to her, set imaginations ablaze across the neighborhood, and Ahmed finds himself the prime suspect. However detectives Rachel Kupferstein and Jean Hamelot are not short of leads. What is the connection between a disbanded hip-hop group and the fiery extremist preachers that jostle in the streets for attention? And what is the mysterious new pill that is taking the district by storm?

"In debut novel Karim Miské demonstrates a masterful control of setting, as he moves seamlessly between the sensual streets of Paris and the synagogues of New York to reveal the truth behind a horrifying crime."




Karim will appear at the following events to celebrate the launch of Arab Jazz:

OXFORD – Monday 9 February 2015, 7pm at Blackwell’s Oxford: Karim Miské in conversation with Tariq Ali. Tickets: £3 (Tel: 01865 333623
Email: events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

LONDON – Tuesday 10 February 2015, 7pm at Institut Français: The Spectrum of Radicalism – Fact and Fiction. Karim Miské in conversation with Kenan Malik and Suzanne Moore. Tickets: £8/£6

LONDON – Wednesday 11 February 2015, 7pm at Waterstones Piccadilly: Collisions of Faith and Culture. Karim Miské in conversation with Sarah Lotz and Elif Shafak. Tickets: FREE (but please reserve your place by email: piccadilly@waterstones.com)
Susannah Tarbush, London

International Prize for Arabic Fiction announces 2015 shortlist 


Atef Abu Saif of Palestine, Jana Elhassan of Lebanon, Lina Huyan Elhassan of Syria, Shukri al-Mabkhout of Tunisia, Ahmed al-Madeeni of Morocco and Hammour Ziada of Sudan were today announced as the six authors shortlisted for this year's $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, often referred to as the Arabic Booker Prize).  For the first time in IPAF's eight year history, no Egyptian author appears on the shortlist.

The shortlisted novels are A Suspended Life (published by Al-Ahlia) by Atef Abu Saif;  Floor 99 ( Difaf Publications) by Jana Elhassan;  Diamonds and Women (Dar al-Adab) by Lina Huyan Elhassan;   The Italian (Dar Tanweer, Tunis) by Shukri al-Mabkhout;  Willow Alley(Al-Markez al-Thaqafi al-Arabi) by Ahmed al-Madeeni and The Longing of the Dervish(Dar al-Ain) by Hammour Ziada. 

IPAF is awarded annually for prose fiction in Arabic. The winner receives $50,000, plus the $10,000 that goes to each of the six shortlisted finalists.  The novels were chosen from 180 entries from 15 countries, all published within the last 12 months.

The winner of IPAF 2015 will be announced at an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on Wednesday 6 May - the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The prize, launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007, is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and is funded by the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority. There is additional support from Abu Dhabi International Book Fair and Etihad Airways

In keeping with IPAF tradition, the identities of the judges of the prize were kept secret until the press conference in Casablanca, Morocco, to announce their choice of shortlisted novels. The  chair of the judges was revealed to be the award-winning Palestinian poet and writer, Mourid Barghouti. His fellow judges are Egyptian academic  Ayman A. El-Desouky; Bahraini poet, critic, and media expert Parween Habib; Iraqi critic and academic Najim A. Kadhim, and Japanese academic, translator and researcher Kaoru Yamamoto. 

The press conference was held at the Royal Mansour Hotel, in partnership with the Moroccan Ministry of Culture and the Casablanca International Book Fair. 

The judges praised the effective and creative artistic techniques with which the writers approached their subjects. Such techniques included: adopting a flowing, quiet narrative when rendering the intricacies of a violent history (Floor 99); the widening, panoramic view offered of a tumultuous period of history, through a gripping and inspiring story (The Italian); the ability of a narrator to effectively portray the cruelties a society can inflict on its dispossessed minority (Willow Alley); delving into the complex and hidden recesses of a human soul which is grappling with the authority of the sacred, whether religious or secular (The Longing of the Dervish); a writer being able to undo fixed views by offering rich counter narratives, penetrating into the intricacies of social realities (A Suspended Life); and, finally, the shrewd narration that blends disparate life stories into one account of intertwined destinies (Diamonds and Women). 

One formerly shortlisted novelist, Jana Elhassan (Me, She and the Other Women, 2013) makes the list along with a former nadwa participant, Lina Huyan Elhassan. (The IPAF nadwa or workshop is held annually for around a week to encourage emerging Arab authors, with established Arab authors acting as mentors).

The shortlisted authors are a mixture of academics and journalists and range widely in age, with Ahmed al-Madeeni the eldest at 67 and Jana Elhassan the youngest at 30. There is one debut novelist, Shukri al-Mabkhout, with The Italian. One of the books, The Longing of the Dervish, was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in December 2014. 

Chair of the judges Mourid Barghouti commented: "Reading the 180 novels nominated for the Prize this year, the judges observed that the thematic concerns were broadly similar. Our objective was to identify the ability of the novelists to find artistic solutions and fresh technical approaches to their themes. We believe that this is reflected in the six novels announced today."  


Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of Trustees, said: The novels on this year's shortlist feature a diverse range of characters and narratives stances and styles. They are all marked with subtlety of voice and force of vision. This list builds on the success of previous years in bringing quality Arabic fiction to wider audiences.

THE 2015 SHORTLIST 

Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973, to a family originally from Jaffa. He holds a B.A. from Birzeit University, an M.A. from the University of Bradford (UK) and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Florence, Italy. Abu Saif teaches Political Science at the University of Al-Azhar, Gaza, and is Chief Editor of Siyasat magazine, published by the Public Policy Institute in Ramallah. He is the author of four novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000) and The Sour Grapes of Paradise (2003). He has also published two collections of short stories, three plays and a number of books of political science, including: Civil Society and the State: A Foundational Reading with Particular Reference to Palestine (2005). He writes a weekly article for the Palestinian Ayyam newspaper. Abu Saif edited, and contributed a story to, The Book of Gaza - an anthology of short stories by Palestinian writers published last summer by Comma Press. His account of the 2014 Gaza War The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries From a City Under Fire, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky, is forthcoming from Comma. His acclaimed dispatches during that war appeared in international publications including the New York Times, The Sunday Times and Guernica. 


A Suspended Life is set in a Gaza refugee camp. Naim runs the only print shop in the camp, where he prints posters of martyred members of the community. When he is shot and killed by the Army, the fallout from his death changes the lives of the community living a quiet life on the fringes of the camp, where Naim's house sits on a small hill. The place has historical significance for the residents and, when the government plans to build a police station and mosque on the spot where Naim's house stands, this leads to a clash between the residents and the police. 

Jana Elhassan is a Lebanese novelist and journalist, born in 1985. She has worked in journalism and translation since 2009 and has published literary texts and short stories in a number of cultural periodicals. Her first novel, Forbidden Desires, was published in 2009 and won the Simon Hayek Prize in Batroun, northern Lebanon. Her novel Me, She and the Other Women was shortlisted for IPAF 2013. 


Floor 99 unfolds between the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon and life in the city of New York in 2000. Majd is a young Palestinian man who bears a scar from the massacre. In present day New York, he falls in love with Hilda, a dancer, whose wealthy family from Mount Lebanon thrived on the power of the Christian right wing during the Lebanese civil war - who were directly linked to the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. When Hilda decides to return to her village on Mount Lebanon to discover her roots, Majd is torn between mental images of the old enemy and his fear of losing her. He is forced to reflect on the painful events which took the life of his pregnant mother and turned his father, a teacher, into a rose-seller on the streets of Harlem. From his office on the 99th floor of a New York building, Majd's Palestinian identity seems ambiguous, especially given that he was born and has always lived in exile. The novel reflects on the power of love to cleanse hatred and brings the post-war Lebanese generation face-to-face with their ancestors. 




Lina Huyan Elhassan is a Syrian novelist, born in 1975. She obtained a Diploma in Advanced Philosophy Studies from the Damascus University. She currently lives in Lebanon and has worked as a journalist since 2003. She has published nine works of fiction and non-fiction, including novels, poetry and studies of the Syrian desert. She took part in the 2010 nadwa - writers' residential workshop - hosted by IPAF. 

Diamonds and Women describes two generations of Arab exiles, revealing the secret, privileged world of Arab emigrants and showing their influence on their chosen cities of Paris, Sao Paolo and Damascus. The novel focuses particularly on Syrians living in Paris and Sao Paolo from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s and 1980s and the experiences of the heroine, Almaz, as she witnesses key points of Arab social and political history in the modern era. 


Shukri al-Mabkhout was born in Tunis in 1962. He holds a state doctorate in Literature from the Arts College of Manouba, Tunisia, and is head of the Manouba University. He is on the editorial board of several refereed journals, including the magazine published by the Institute of Arabic Literature in Tunis (Ibla) and Romano Arabica published by The Centre for Arab Studies in Bucharest, Romania. He is the author of several works of literary criticism. 

The Italianis al-Mabkhout's first novel. At its heart  is Abdel Nasser (nicknamed 'the Italian') and his mysterious assault on the Imam, his neighbour, during his father's funeral procession. The book's narrator attempts to uncover the motivations behind the attack, re-constructing his friend Abdel Nasser's troubled history from childhood. It looks at Abdel Nasser's time as a left-wing student at the University of Tunis, during the final years of the Bourguiba era and the beginning of Ben Ali's, through to the period of radical changes that subsequently rocked Tunisian society, when the dreams of a generation were torn apart by the fierce struggle between the Islamists and the Left. The novel reveals the mechanisms of control and censorship exercised through the press as well as the fragility of human beings, their secret histories and buried wounds. 


Ahmed al-Madeeni is a Moroccan writer, born in 1947. He studied at the University of Morocco, the University of Paris 8, and the Sorbonne, where he gained his doctorate. He has published a number of novels and short story collections as well as works of literary criticism. His complete works were published in five volumes by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture in 2014. He won the Moroccan Prize for Literary Criticism in 2006 and the Moroccan Prize for the short story in 2009. He holds an academic post in higher education. 


Willow Alley tells the story of a bustling, ancient Moroccan town which hides many secrets, where residents struggle to live in peace while at the mercy of a few arrogant and despotic individuals. Focusing on the struggle between the caretaker of a building under construction and a group of people clinging to their land in order to survive, the novel examines the individual's right to exist in a country where lives are vulnerable to exploitation and the powerful thrive at the expense of the weak. 


Hammour Ziada is a Sudanese writer and journalist, born in Khartoum in 1977. He has worked for charitable and civil society organisations, and as a journalist for a number of Sudanese newspapers, including Al-Mustaqilla, Ajras al-Horriya, and Al-Jarida. He was Chief Editor of the cultural section of the Sudanese Al-Akhbar paper. He is the author of several works of fiction: A Life Story from Omdurman (short stories, 2008), Al-Kunj (a novel, 2010), Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain (short stories, 2014). His second novel, The Longing of the Dervish (2014), now shortlisted for IPAF 2015, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2014.

The Longing of the Dervish, set in 19th century Sudan during the collapse of the theocratic state, follows the story of Bakhi Mindeel, a former slave newly released from prison and seeking revenge for his imprisonment. His release coincides with the end of the Mahdist war, a British colonial war fought between Egypt and a section of Sudanese society seeking independence under their religious leader, Mahdi when Mahdi and his followers are defeated and force to flee. The Longing of the Dervish examines the social conflict between white Christian and Islamic Sufi cultures in Sudan, exploring the concepts of love, religion, betrayal and political struggle. 

IPAF 2015 Judging Panel 

Mourid Barghouti (Chair) is an award-winning Palestinian poet and writer. He has produced 12 volumes of poetic works, the first published in 1972 and the last in 2005. His poetry has been translated into many other languages and won him the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000. He is also the author of two novels: I Saw Ramallah (2003) and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). I Saw Ramallah won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 1997 and was translated into several languages, including English, with an introduction written by Edward Said. He has written articles of literary criticism on poetry and prose and delivered lectures on Arabic literature at several Arab and international universities. 

Ayman A. El-Desouky is an Egyptian academic and the Founding Chair of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS, 2009-2012) at SOAS, University of London, where he has been lecturing on Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature since 2002. He is also co-founder of a pioneering programme in Global English Literary Studies (launched 2014). Dr El-Desouky has lectured on World Literature and American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin (1993-1995), on Arabic Language and Literature at Baltimore  Johns Hopkins University (1995-1996), where he founded a new programme in Arabic Language and Literature, and at Harvard University (1996-2002). He is a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). He has lectured widely on hermeneutics, comparative literature and literary theory in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East. His most recent publications include: The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amara and the 2011 Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Between Hermeneutic Provenance and Textuality: The Qur'an and the Question of Method in Approaches to World Literature, Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 16.3 (2014); and Heterologies of Revolutionary Action: On Historical Consciousness and the Sacred in Mahfouz's Children of the Alley, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.4 (September 2011). He is currently preparing a long monograph on Figuring the Sacred in the Modern Arabic Novel for Edinburgh University Press. 


Parween Habib is a Bahraini poet, critic and media expert. She has overseen specialist training for Dubai Media Incorporated and helped to launch highly successful cultural dialogue programmes, the first of their kind in the Gulf. In 2011, she won the Dynamic Women Prize awarded by The George Washington University, the first international prize to be given to successful and inspiring women from around the globe. Her story was studied by students of the university on one of the world's largest online networks. She is the author of two critical works and three poetry collections and her poetry has been translated into seven languages. 

Habib obtained an MA (with distinction) in Literary Criticism, focusing on the poetic style of Nizar Qabbani, from Ain Shams University, Cairo, and a PhD (with distinction) in Literary Criticism: a study of the language of women's poetry in the Gulf (1975-2004), from the Arab League University, Egypt. Her book on Techniques of Expression in the Poetry of Nizar Qabbani is part of the Arabic language curriculum at secondary school level in Bahrain. Habib is a member of the committee for modernising methods of teaching the Arabic language, an initiative of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. She writes a weekly article for Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and a monthly article for the Dubai Cultural magazine. She has conducted televised interviews with 500 Arab novelists, poets and thinkers. Her poetry collections include: Your Scared Masculinity, my Paper Childhood (2001), I Gave the Mirror my Back (2009), The Butterfly (2012), and a book of prose entitled: Lace/Less than the Desert (2010). 

Najim A. Kadhim is an Iraqi critic and academic, born in Iraq in 1951. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Exeter (UK) in 1984. He has since taught there as a visiting lecturer, and has also taught at universities in Iraq, Libya, Jordan and Oman. He currently teaches Critical Theory, Modern Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Baghdad's College of Arts. His special area of interest is 'The Other in modern Arabic literature'. 

Among his published works are: The Problem of Dialogue in the Arabic Novel (2004), winner of the 2003 Rashid Bin Humaid Award in the UAE; The Other in Modern Arabic Poetry (2010), winner of the 2010 YBA Kanoo Award in Bahrain; Icons of Delusion: the Arab Critic and Problematics of Modern Criticism (2011), longlisted for the 2014 Sheikh Zayed Book Award; Us and the Other in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2013), winner of the 2014 Arab Creativity Award given by the Arab Thought Foundation in Lebanon; Encyclopedia of the Iraqi Novel 1919-2014 (2015). 

Kaoru Yamamoto is a Japanese academic, translator and researcher. Having received her PhD in Literature from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, she lectures in Arabic language, literature and culture at several Japanese universities. She has published many articles on both classical and modern Arabic literature, and has translated many works, including those of Emile Habiby, Rashid al-Daif and Abdul Rahman al-Abnudi, into Japanese. She was previously a research associate of the Research and Educational Project for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Here she took charge of the translation team, which focuses on Arabic daily papers, and published a textbook on the translation of Media Arabic into Japanese.  

Previous IPAF winners

Delivering on its aim to increase the international reach of Arabic fiction, the Prize has guaranteed English translations for all of its winners: 2008 - Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (Egypt); 2009 - Azazeel by Youssef Ziedan (Egypt); 2010 - Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Abdo Khal (Saudi Arabia); 2011 - The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari (Morocco) and The Doves' Necklace by Raja Alem (Saudi Arabia); 2012 - The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber (Lebanon); 2013 -  The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi (Kuwait); 2014 - Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq).

Taher's Sunset Oasis was translated into English by Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton) in 2009 and has gone on to be translated into at least eight languages worldwide. Ziedan's Azazeel was published in the UK by Atlantic Books in April 2012, while 2013 saw the publication of Spanish translations of Baha Taher's Sunset Oasis (El Oasis) and Rabee Jaber's The Druze of Belgrade (Los Drusos de Belgrado) and Youssef Ziedan's Azazeel (Azazel) by Madrid-based publisher Turner. More recently, English translations of Abdo Khal and Mohammed Achaari's winning novels appeared on bookshop shelves in 2014, published by the Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation. 

Saud Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, June) will be published in the UK in April 2015. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi has recently secured English publication with Oneworld in the UK and Penguin Books in the US. It is set to be published in Autumn 2016, translated into English by Jonathan Wright.

British author John McHugo explores the historical roots of the Syrian predicament
by Susannah Tarbush 
(An Arabic version of this article appeared in Al-Hayat newspaper on 28 February 2015)

Despite the crucial importance of Syria in today’s turbulent international politics, there is a striking lack of in-depth knowledge of the country and its history in much of the West. In the preface to his book “Syria: A Recent History”, British author John McHugo writes: “To the English-speaking world Syria is a far-off country which relatively few people have made a serious effort to understand.”

The “Arab Spring” aroused great interest and excitement when it began. But when the crackdown on protesters in Syria evolved into civil war and a man-made humanitarian crisis, “disaster fatigue seemed all too often to be the general reaction to what was happening.”

McHugo’s book, published by Saqi Books in London as a paperback in March, makes a valuable contribution towards increasing knowledge and understanding of Syria and of the historical processes that contributed to the dire situation in it is today.

The book will appeal to the specialist and the general reader alike. In addition to McHugo’s lively, clear, and admirably fair-minded and balanced text, the book includes copious notes on each chapter, an extensive bibliography, a nine-page chronology of history, maps and a glossary of terms.

Saqi published the first edition of McHugo’s book in mid-2014 as a hardback entitled “Syria: From the Great War to Civil War”. For the new, paperback, edition under the title “Syria: A Recent History” McHugo has updated his text to take into account changes on the ground since the first edition was published.

The new edition includes high praise for the book from publications such as the Sunday Herald, Jordan Times, Journal of Peace , and Times Literary Supplement, and from experts and scholars including Nikolaus van Dam, Ray Hinnebusch and Andrew Arsan.

The New York publisher The New Press bought the North American publishing rights to the book. It published the book in February this year as a hardback and as an e-book under the title: “Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years.”

McHugo is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews University, Scotland, a board member of the Council for Arab British Understanding (CAABU) and a member of the supervisory board of the British Egyptian Society.He read Arabic at Wadham College, Oxford University, and after graduating in 1973 he spent two years at the American University in Cairo studying for an MA in Islamic History.

While at the American University in Cairo McHugo made his first visit to Syria, taking a walking holiday in November 1974 through the mountains from the Crusader Castle at Crac de Chevaliers to the Assassins’ Castle at Masyaf. He spent every night as the guest of local people, and in his book he describes his various encounters with Syrians, who clearly made a deep impression on him.

From the American University in Cairo McHugo returned to Oxford University and obtained an MLitt degree in Medieval Sufi Literature. He then studied law and qualified as a solicitor, working first in Oman, and then in London for the Bahraini government, and later spending much time in Cairo.

McHugo joined the Liberal Democrats because that party opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he is chairman of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine.

Sadly, one way in which he has had to update his book for the new edition is in giving increased figures on the devastating human toll of the civil war. By December 2014 an estimated 200,000 Syrians had been killed. Of the population of almost 22.2 million people, more than 9.6 million had fled their homes: of these, 3.2 million had left Syria, while a further 6.45 million were internally displaced. McHugo has also updated the book in terms of the rise and expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Shaam (ISIS), and its declaration of a Caliphate state in June 2014.

A major recurring theme of the book is the effect of actions of outside powers on Syria over the past 100 years, with France and Britain deciding under the 1916 secret Sykes Picot agreement on how to carve up Greater Syria and neighbouring parts of the former Ottoman Empire after the end of the First World War.

One reason the English-speaking world knows relatively little about Syria is that after the First World War it was the French who got the mandate for Syria and Lebanon while Britain had the mandates for Palestine and Iraq. McHugo is highly critical of French actions in Syria. France had a vision of a permanent presence in Syria, which conflicted with the “sacred trust of civilisation” which the mandate system of the League of Nations was supposed to provide. Another major outside factor has been the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has had “an enormous and deleterious effect on Syria” over the years.

During the Cold War Syria was a pawn between the Soviet Union and USA, and “in fact today’s Syrian civil war could be said to be the last proxy conflict of the Cold War.” Or, even more disturbingly, as “the harbinger of the revival of the Cold War which has now begun in Ukraine.”

Certain Arab states – especially Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia – and non-Arab Middle East countries Iran and Turkey have also “played games” in Syria. It is because of the importance of the outside factors that for each of the main periods covered in his book, McHugo first considers the impact of wars and foreign affairs before turning to the developments which took place within Syria.

At each stage “events happening outside Syria circumscribed the freedom of action open to its rulers and foreclosed the options available to them. This does not excuse or justify some of the actions those rulers took, but their actions cannot be examined in isolation from what was going on between Syria and its neighbours.”

McHugo sees one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Syrian politics as being what happened to Ba’thism. Initially a nationalist movement which seemingly cared deeply about social justice and healing the rifts in society throughout the Arab world, it had the added advantage for Syrians of having been born in Damascus. But the way in which Ba’thism degenerated into the dictatorship of the Assads is “an object lesson for other Arab countries at the present time.”

Another salutary example is the chaos of parliamentary life in Syria under the mandate and the years after independence. “The glimpses of that chaos which this book contains are a dire warning. It led to impatience with elected politicians and is part of the story of the descent into dictatorship.”

The importance of religious politics grew as a reaction to the failures of Ba’thists and other Arab nationalists. “Islamism is not well understood in the West. It is ultimately a quest for authenticity and identity” McHugo says. “Many Syrians may well want a form of democracy that acknowledges in some way the Islamic roots of the majority of the population. Such a democracy could not be more different from the kind of rule offered by militant organisations like al-Qa’ida or ISIS, which are infamous for their brutality and intolerance.”


McHugo makes interesting comparisons between the behaviour of the French in crushing the 1925-27 Syrian revolt, and the campaign of violence since 2011 by the Ba’thist regime of Bashar al-Assad. In both cases the regimes resorted to intense violence against civilians, as in al-Assad’s bombardment of civilian areas and his recruitment of militias such as the Shabiha to terrorise rural areas and put down uprisings.

Both the French and Ba’thist regimes demonised their opponents as religious extremists. There was a strong feeling among Syrian protestors that the French in 1925, and Bashar al-Assad today, lacked legitimacy. And in both cases expectations had been raised: before the French arrived, Syrians had expected that their country would become independent, while in the early years of Bashar’s presidency many hoped he would reform the system and bring freedom. The weakness of the economy, and the failure of government to help the population, also helped to fuel both the 1925 rebellion and the uprising which began in 2011.

 Historical comparisons can also be drawn between the harshness of the response of Bashar al-Assad’s regime against the demonstrations that grew into a civil war and that of his father Hafez al-Assad in Hama in 1982.

President Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar in his turn demonized their opponents as Islamist fanatics. While Hafez al-Assad found overwhelming force worked against his opponents, the actions of Bashar’s regime against people demonstrating for their freedom helped turn the protests into an Islamist uprising. “It was much easier to fight with tanks and bomber aircraft against a demonised opponent in battles that destroyed half the urban landscape of Syria than to deal with crowds agitating for their human rights and free elections.”

McHugo often wonders what became of those Syrians and their families he met while he was walking in the mountains on his first trip to Syria four decades ago. On that trip he was entertained by Orthodox Christians, Ismaili Muslims and Sunni Muslims, and what struck him most was the great similarity between them all. “Whatever differences their religions might have, the likenesses were far greater.” Whenever he has returned to Syria – most recently in December 2014 – he has observed exactly the same thing.

McHugo writes that although at the moment Syrians are being forced back into their sectarian identities, “I refuse to believe that in Syria the secularism based on mutual respect between members of different faiths has ended. But I also know that many would now call this belief of mine an act of faith. Only time will tell.”

report and photos by Susannah Tarbush

Every year the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature organises an event in London to celebrate the winner of the annual Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. The event is timed to coincide with the presence of the winner in London to receive the £3,000 prize at the official ceremony for the awarding of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and other translation prizes administered by the Society of Authors.


This year's event was held at Waterstones Piccadilly - Europe's largest book store - on the evening of 24th February, the eve of the Society of Authors' awards ceremony. It had a unique flavour in that, for the first time in the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize's nine-year history, the winner - Iraqi-born writer, translator and academic Sinan Antoon - was awarded the prize for a translation of his own work, The Corpse Washer. The novel was originally published in Arabic in 2010, as Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (The Pomegranate Tree Alone) by al-Mu'assasah al-Arabiyya lil-Dirasat of Beirut. Antoon's translation was published in 2013 by Yale University Press, within its Margellos World Republic of Letters series.

Antoon had travelled to London from the USA where he is an associate professor at the Gallatin School, New York University. He was interviewed at Waterstones as both author and translator, by broadcaster and writer Paul Blezard, one of the prize judges. The other three judges, present in the packed out audience at Waterstones, were literary translator and joint winner of the 2013 prize Jonathan Wright; translator and writer Lulu Norman, and Banipal editor and trustee Samuel Shimon.


Antoon proved an inspiring interviewee in his wide-ranging discussion with Paul Blezard, combining profundity with humour. The evening included a reception with wine and Arabic food, and the ambience was further enhanced by the soulful oud playing of Khyam Allami who was born in Damascus to Iraq parents in 1981. Allami performed an evocative solo as a prelude to the interview,  and his melodies softly accompanied Antoon's three readings from The Corpse Washer.

The audience was welcomed by Paul Starkey, chair of the Banipal Trust, who was until his retirement Professor of Arabic at Durham University. Starkey explained that the Banipal Trust oversees the operation of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize in conjunction with the Society of Authors, and that the prize is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash and his family in memory of Omar's late father Saif Ghobash, " a diplomat and a man of internationalist leanings, passionate about literature, who died in 1977 while still in his forties."
Blezard noted that the list of 17 works entered for the 2014 prize had been very strong. "You should be rightfully proud, not only for yourself as a writer and translator but also proud of the novel you created: it is a hell of a work," he told Antoon.

Edited transcript of interview:

Paul Blezard: A review in Al-Akhbar says this is the first Arab novel to tackle the subject of washing and shrouding the dead. Can I ask you first what you set out to write? And why did you choose this difficult area?

Sinan Antoon: I was actually writing another novel about something else and I just came across a story in the New York Times and then in Al-Hayat about this man who was a corpse washer. He was born into this family, he was in his early 30s, he was making a lot of money because of all the death in Iraq, but he was traumatised and was planning to leave the country so that his son would not inherit the profession. As soon as I read this story I cried; it touched me on so many different levels. It’s a harrowing story but it seemed to me that that person is the one person who deals - in addition to people who work at the morgue of course - with the full impact of violence. But it touched me as a very powerful story and -although I usually ridicule these kind of statements - at that point I realised that that I'm going to write a novel about this person.

I was fascinated by this corpse washing: the story described some of the rituals and they sounded so poetic and beautiful and sad. I went to the library and got out all of these books of Shiite theology and started to read about the details, and it just fascinated me. And later, I realised that it also seemed to be the most perfect structure and theme to deal with so many issues that I and so many other Iraqis have been dealing with. What does it mean when a society disintegrates? What does it mean when there is so much massive violence on a daily basis that defies logic? And what saddens me also in reading the stories of the corpse washers is that they had to deal with new types of death that had not been described in the manuals.

Paul Blezard: you’d read this piece of journalism in the New York Times; were there other stories you could draw on?  

Sinan Antoon: there were a few interviews with corpse washers, primarily in Iraq, who were speaking to some of these issues: how they used to have one or two corpses in the past and now they’re having this flood of corpses, but also how they were dealing with the new, sadly evil, creativity of human beings who are now mutilating the bodies in a new way. There wasn’t that much in terms of details, which was good for me in that I could then invent and add a lot of material.

Paul Blezard:The Corpse Washer is a story about the washing of corpses, and the treating of respect of the dead, as a way of telling a much bigger picture, which is the picture of Baghdad, which is the picture of Iraq. These are big issues to deal with for any novelist: it’s a very slim volume dealing with a massive concept. How did you figure out what you could and couldn’t deal with through the eyes of the corpse washer – and his father of course, this is also a transgenerational story. 

Sinan Antoon: initially I was very excited, because this is a rich subject, and then I had this paranoia because I realised I’d left Baghdad in 199 and grew up in a Christian family. But then I realised that that’s the challenge of the artist, to write about other worlds and not only one’s own. I’ve been haunted, and still am, by the figure of working men and women who every day, everywhere, have to wake up and deal with life and don’t have the option of giving up, it’s a luxury. So that helped me, but it was helpful that Jawad the main character is of my own generation so I had lived some of what he lived. And  frankly - although I always say it raises my blood pressure and has given me an ulcer - I obsessively followed the news since I was a kid. Being away from Iraq, I tried to over-compensate by following the news way too much so that I don’t feel that I’ve lost touch.

Way too many novels in the Arab world deal with intellectuals and with the elite and I was more interested in a lower middle class, or even working class, person, and also to chart this secular space that existed once and that’s eroding, and also to deal with a very important subject which is how does a person who is secular - and there are many people like Jawad in Iraq and elsewhere - deal with increasing sectarianism and the rise of the politicisation of religion. How do they maintain their own sanity, and how do they not themselves become sectarian? So I don’t know if these issues helped me have a more compact approach into the character, and also I think what helped, looking back now, is that most of the thinking and the action takes place within this space of the mghaysil and the corpse washing. So the daily rituals themselves kind of impose a certain order that helped me.  

Paul Blezard: There's a poetic metre and a cadence to the narrative of the story you tell. I’m interested by what you say about telling the story of a person out of the working classes, who in any conflict are the ones who really suffer and whose story is so rarely told. Which makes me want to ask this - which is a bit of a weird question perhaps - what responsibilities did you feel when you were writing this to those working class voices who are so rarely heard? And also as a Christian, or brought up as a Christian, writing about Shia and also about Sunni. 

Sinan Antoon: well that’s the challenge, and I cherish the challenge in a way. The challenge is always - whether it’s race or gender or ethnicity or class - how to get into that world and really live the personalities without exoticising them. So frankly that was my fear. In addition the neighbourhood where most of the events take place, Al- Kazimiyya , is a place that I’ve only been to a few times.  But then thanks to the digital world we live in... for example there in the shrine in Al-Kazimiyya there is a website that has an inside camera that shows you the inside of the shrine. And none of this goes into the novel, but it made me feel secure that I at least know the surroundings and all of that.

And I guess I’m lucky that I lived in a neighbourhood that used to be a middle-class suburb in the 1960s and 70s. In the 80s, because of the social changes in Iraq, it became a mixture of working class and middle class families. So the people I played football with when I was a kid and hung out with were from different classes. So working class background and cultural world is not alien to me. And maybe being a Marxist at heart helps as well.

Paul Blezard: Why? 

Sinan Antoon: this may sound ‘70s, but some things were good in the 70s. Having a sensitivity to material reality and, frankly, social injustice, and economic injustice. And that is one thing that's  inescapable in Iraq and the USA: how class over-determines much - not everything, but much - of one’s world and where one goes, what one imagines, what one can do and what one cannot do.

Paul Blezard: it’s one of the aspects of this book that I particularly enjoyed, the interconnectedness of society

Sinan Antoon: Now I come out as a communist!

Paul Blezard: the communist catholic 

Sinan Antoon: we have a communist pope now, so..!

Paul Blezard: I have this luxurious position that I can talk to you not only as the author but also as the translator. And it is quite an act, to translate your own work. Can you talk us through how you approached that? Did you just go in and think OK, well I can turn this into an English story, into a story told through English, or is it more complicated than that? 

Sinan Antoon: It’s all about being selfish, basically. Two reasons primarily. I was so invested in the characters and in the events, and so when I finished the novel in Arabic, as with most authors I felt this postpartum depression because now there was this void. And naturally I wanted it to be translated and I couldn’t trust anyone else to do the translation, not because I am the best translator but because all of the references to the Qur’an and to things in Iraq itself and in Baghdad and in the poetry and all of that, and having been trained in Arabic and Islamic studies I thought I would be the person.

But it was selfish in that I wanted in a kind of masochistic way to go back to that atmosphere of the novel and to those characters and live with them again, painful as it was. So initially it was just the inability to deal with the void that comes after finishing a book that is very heavy in its subject matter and that - I should have said this about your previous question - was one way for me  to process , or try to process, all of the news that was coming out of Iraq, and that is still coming out every day and is really harrowing for any human being, but particularly for people who are from that country . And the novel was one way of trying to make sense or nonsense of it and the translation is just another act, a repeat in a way.

Paul Blezard: How much time was there between your finishing the Arabic version and then starting on the English translation? 

Sinan Antoon: I started translating it about five months after I finished.

Paul Blezard: so not that big a gap. But isn’t there the urge to update the story? Because I know from my own writing, every time you look at a piece of writing you think “I could do better now”. We only write to the best of our ability at that time but you can’t walk into the same room twice.

Sinan Antoon: definitely. I say in the preface that works ... it’s about poems but I think it applies ... that works are never finished, they’re only abandoned.

Paul Blezard: or published! 

Sinan Antoon: actually it goes back to Ibn al-Muqaffa’, the pre-modern Persian Arab author, who had a great quote about how human beings are never content with the text that they finish. There were certain parts where going back and looking at the text now as a reader and as a translator parts here and there where I thought maybe I overdid it a little bit in terms of description or what not, but of course it’s very difficult and challenging because I couldn’t completely step out of the author and just be a detached reader. But I was surprised that I didn’t change much, and maybe that’s not a good thing, though there were a few sentences in dialogue mostly that I took out. But I didn’t take out any big chunks. 

 Paul Blezard: so you resisted the urge to rewrite, it was actually an act of translation. 

Sinan Antoon: Yes, and not only that, I resisted the assaults of the editor which is a problem that a lot of translators from Arabic and other non-European literatures face, especially in the US.  

Paul Blezard: if you don’t mind, we have some of the Arab world’s finest editors and translators here in this audience. 

Sinan Antoon: yes, so they know, but I think Marilyn Booth has written an article about how US editors try to kind of domesticate the Arabic text so I won’t keep harping on it. But the editor wanted, for example, to take out most of the nightmares I have in the novel, and to my mind that’s the skeleton of the novel. I said well if we take out the nightmares then let’s take out the whole novel and not publish it. So I resisted all of that, not that any text is perfect, but I guess it might sound weird but to me those characters and the events are real, and to my mind they actually happened...  these characters did say these sentences, and to imagine that they didn’t say them would fragment and fracture this wall that I had built.


Sinan Antoon: I do, not in terms of fetishising: I think all good literary texts are immensely tied to the place they’re written in but they also speak to larger issues. It is about a very important period, specifically the civil sectarian war in Iraq but also about these last three decades, that are the most violent in the country’s history and that have changed everything about the country. But there is something that doesn’t come out in English, sadly - that’s the loss, the real loss - I always write the dialogue in the Iraqi spoken dialect and it’s impossible to bring that out in English. So in Arabic it is specifically definitely a very Iraqi novel, because the dialogue is all in the Iraqi colloquial.

Paul Blezard: one of the things the judges liked was the sense of poetry. It’s like a little perfect jewel, a little piece of amber, perfect in form. I wondered how conscious you were - as the writer now, not the translator - about this almost imperceptible sense of atmosphere of the place in which the events happen. Let alone the characters. But this sense of where the water feeds into the pomegranate tree... I’m not going to give anything away here, but we see we have this pomegranate .... of rebirth of renewal and of redemption in a way, but this calmness, this stillness, the dustiness that you describe, were you aware of that as you were writing, was that conscious? Or is that part of the alchemy of authorship, it happens while you are thinking of other things?

Sinan Antoon: I think it is the alchemy, and then I’ll make another confession: as much as I love writing fiction much of my reading is actually poetry, even as I write, and actually the energy I’ve spent in translation was mostly translating poetry from Arabic to English and from English to Arabic. I’ve read a lot of fiction of course but in recent years maybe - I’m just guessing - it’s the effect of reading poetry. In the intense moments, of trauma and suffering I turn to poetry, I don’t turn to novels. So maybe that’s part of it, I don’t know. I’m happy with it but the refrain now in the Arab world is that they criticise novelists who write in a poetic way. And in that sense they agree with the American editors who for example said the title is too poetic; I told them only in America is being poetic a liability - it’s supposedly a good thing to be poetic, right?

So it’s not planned, but retroactively it might be the hegemony of a certain type of reading. And when I think of Iraq frankly and remember, I’m haunted by poets such as Muzaffar al-Nawab and al-Jawhiri... I can’t stop myself from using them in the novels and I think that diction and the atmosphere come back.

Paul Blezard: Can we talk about the brutality? You’re describing the result of brutality; how did you approach that? These corpses are coming into this place, they’re being washed, because of acts of brutality,  it’s a prism into the brutal world outside the doors of this building. 

Sinan Antoon: The challenge is some of us have the luxury of looking away, or even not looking, and what was compelling to me about the figure of the corpse washer, beginning from the newspaper story I read, is that here is a man who cannot look away, he has to look. So this  brutality is happening and there are different approaches. Some people like to leave it unsaid and unspoken. To my mind it had to be all described, but how does one do that without it being too gruesome? So I tried as much as possible to inhabit the persona of someone like Jawad who ....but for him being an artist and also the conflict of being someone who is not a believer, who is doing something because he has to for financial reasons, but he comes to understand the importance of these rituals and he never loses.. he never becomes detached and just a robot that does it mechanically.

Paul Blezard: it’s his compassion and humanity that carries a lot of this novel. 

Sinan Antoon: yes, and not to sound banal but there are so many people like that. I mean you read about them in every society, who have to do these really horrendous jobs in professions from which there is no redemption, there is no pleasure, there is no upward mobility, there is the same every day and they have to make sense out of it and find some kind of meaning. Some people misread it as kind of defeatist but it’s actually about resilience, about someone who’s talented and ambitious but history does not allow him to become an artist. He's forced into this profession, but he realises that fate or chance gave him this responsibility and he then starts to feel a responsibility towards the dead. Which is compassion and a sense of ethical responsibility towards other human beings.

Paul Blezard: Have any of the corpse washers read this do you know? Have you had feeback? 

Sinan Antoon: not yet, I think they’re too busy, but someone from the city of Najaf, where the great majority of Shiites are taken to be buried, read the novel and commended it. He didn’t believe that I wasn’t a Shiite, he said “are you sure you’re not a Shiite?” I said the last time I checked I wasn’t. But it would be of course a great honour, and interesting, to see how they would see it.

Paul Blezard: and how was it received in Iraq in general?

Sinan Antoon: it’s heart-warming and rewarding, I don’t have any complaints. My only complaint is that now everyone is going to expect another The Corpse Washer.

audience QUESTION and ANSWER session

Q:  I think it’s an honour for a Christian to write about a Muslim washing of the dead. It's something so new, I’m sure the Muslim community is indebted to you. Through these three generations, you said, of continuous violence, cycles of torture, I often think about the youth, their hopes and dreams. I left Iraq a long time ago when the time was good. How do the young people endure seeing injustice, brutality, lack of opportunities, the future? 

Sinan Antoon: that’s a very important question. To me one of the few resources of hope are the contacts I have with the young Iraqis who are in Baghdad, who are in their early twenties and are not burdened with history and all of this. They have a desire to live and they have all these initiatives in Baghdad and Iraq under catastrophic conditions of sectarianism and militia culture. They do activities, they write, they have these initiatives for reading, to kind of regenerate a sense of culture, and there are amazing artists and filmmakers and writers coming out. So in the midst of all this, that is the sign of hope, and many of them are unencumbered by the sectarianism and culture of violence of the last three decades. They are very hopeful, which is very important. I always think that despair is a luxury, it can be paralysing; they don’t have the luxury of despair, they have to live, and they have to make do with what they have. And I keep reading about them, not only in the terms of the cultural sense, but the sense of a massive initiative, for example to help all of these people who are displaced. And it crosses all of these lines of sect and ethnicity and religion. So it will take a long time, but that spirit never dies.

And I think the same thing applies to what happened - now I am making the mistake of going into a minefield - but in the 30 years before the Arab revolts we heard time and again from so many so-called intellectuals “oh where are the youth, what are they doing, they’re busy playing video games or watching video clips, they’re not reading” blah, blah - badeyn it turned out that all of these youths were actually inventing and imagining a new world and they actually started revolts. So the challenge for those of us who are outside, or who are of an older generation, is to listen and try to understand and go into the spaces where they go and to understand what they’re going through, and what type of a world they’re imagining. And what kind of victories they will have that some of us couldn’t have.


 Q: I’m halfway through the Arabic novel and it’s fantastic so far. One thing that really struck me, at least in the first half of the book, is that Jawad, the main character, was going to be an artist and then he decided not to be, he went back to his father’s occupation. There are lots of references also to people like Jawad Selim - who incidentally is my great uncle, so I’m glad to see him in the novel. But it was very sad, and also it made me really happy, to see reference to this strong and great history of Iraqi culture and Iraqi art that often gets forgotten, specially here in the West, and that was effectively destroyed. And I wondered if there were some parallels - or whether I’m reading too much into it - with your character Jawad’s decision to return to being a corpse washer. 

Sinan Antoon: No, without being nostalgic or beautifying the past I think a major problem in how many Iraqis look at Iraq is that they conflate Saddam Hussein and the Baath with something called Iraqi society and the Iraqi state. There was a lively Iraqi culture, everyone knows that, before Saddam Hussein appeared and the Iraqi state was a burgeoning state functioning everyone forgets. Modern Arabic poetry was invented in Iraq, and what Jawad Selim and others did in Iraq is something very unique throughout the third world, having this modernity articulated in local forms. So that’s one thing that we cannot afford to forget because a lot of the time this pessimistic look completely cancels out all of the past, as if it’s all just Baathist horror and there was nothing good. We end up erasing our own history.

The other thing that always haunts me is that I consider that I and some of my friends were lucky. There are people from my generation who were, like Jawad, very very talented, and had they had the opportunity they could have been great artists, great writers, great engineers. What I wanted to put forth, which happens so often, is that the structural conditions, the catastrophe of dictatorship and of sanctions and of war, destroyed the potential of people like Jawad. To make ends meet he cannot be an artist and this happened to so many artists and writers specially in the 90s, you could not make a living by being an artist or by being anything, everyone started changing professions. So he has to go back to the only thing that he can do. So it’s not a matter of choice actually, maybe one thing I was unconsciously trying to do.. I hate the term choice that so many people use because it’s ridiculous, thank you for choosing this, thank you for choosing that. Most human beings on this planet have one choice, or two at best and they’re both awful. There's no choice really; of course not to deny human agency, but you have the context that forces you to do certain things.

But to go back to the icons of Iraq, you know international media went to the Firdos Square because they are lazy and because the three 5-star hotels were there. When Iraqis demonstrate they went to Sahat al-Tahrir because that place means something and because that monument, aside from all the politics, is just an amazing work of art. It’s really beautiful. And that’s where people go to restore a sense of a republic with all its problems and attempt at freedom and non-sectarianism and citizenship until today. Even three years ago when there were protests in Iraq after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions that's  where people went, to Sahat al-Tahrir, because that place means something and that monument means something and it invokes a history of creativity and of hope. I’m sounding like a very hopeful person but I’m actually very pessimistic.

Q: I was talking via Skype with an Iraqi journalist in Baghdad the other day and my Skype connection died and I called him back and apologised for the crappy internet in London. He said well I’m glad at least we have one good thing in Baghdad. You  mentioned the video of the website of the shrine in Al-Kazimiyya. I was just wondering if you could expand bit more on the research that you did and also how you used sources on the ground, people you know in Iraq, and also how you experienced that as an author living in exile, having your own cultural realities and your own cultural references, both from Iraq but also as in a sense whether you felt as an outsider as well in trying to approach this story.

Paul Blezard: do you see yourself as living in exile?

Sinan Antoon: no, as living abroad. I think it’s disrespectful to real exiles who suffered prison .. exile is sexy, but ..

Paul Blezard: it carries political weight and gravitas also. The wider question is about research, – obviously the website looking at the shrine and so on and so forth.

Sinan Antoon: Yes, I contacted this foundation in America, a Shii charitable foundation, because I knew they did some of this corpse washing but they completely ignored me. I had wanted to go and see it live but they were not helpful at all. I keep thinking, well I left the country in 1991 and I want to write about what’s happening right now. And at every step I - being a critical reader myself - would be crushed if someone reads and says oh, it is obvious that this guy is living abroad. So, I was incessantly reading the news and collecting everything that I could find about these corpse washers. But the good thing about theology books of all monotheisms is that they’re very much into details. There is a description of every possibility, and everything happening if someone dies abroad, if someone dies on a ship,. And I always say as much as I hate Facebook and YouTube, the reality is that we are lucky. You can actually be living in New York but live in Shanghai or Cairo or Baghdad because you can watch the satellite channels and see everything people are seeing over there and then spend time on Facebook and elsewhere and basically almost consume visually everything that is being consumed over there. So that helps. But I believe  - and this might sound too uncritical and unscientific - that it’s also about passion and about the madness of thinking that you can inhabit the body and life of another person and really try to see the world from their perspective. So that was very helpful. And having lived the first 23 years of my life in Baghdad and having roamed the streets a lot helps I think: it’s always surprising what one has in one’s own archive, that one is not aware of.

Paul Blezard: does Google Earth do Street View of Baghdad?

Sinan Antoon: actually it helped in certain parts, it’s not as extensive as Google elsewhere, but a lot of the streets and where they are, just to double check the names on the map

Q: I’m very interested in your experience as the writer of that particular work, and the translator at once. How did that feel? Did you feel that you were creating the exact self same version of your Arabic novel in English? Did you approach it with the aim of just transferring it from one language into another or did you feel that perhaps that you owned the manuscript as the writer and therefore perhaps maybe attempted to take some liberties with it, or slight liberties, and perhaps saw yourself as creating a very similar but parallel and slightly different piece of work in English? 

Sinan Antoon: yes, both of these actually, there aren’t many changes but of course I had much more liberty than someone who’s translating work by someone else, but I’ve also in dealing with this and others also in dealing with this and others I’ve used the metaphor of musical performances and variations. And you know there is always loss because there this question always comes up, why is there this loss. There is always loss, even in speech, even in language, you know it’s OK but it’s not radically different from the original Arabic, as I said, it’s only that the dialogue doesn’t have the resonance it would have in Arabic.

Paul Blezard: what criticisms as the author do you have of your translator? If you could have a conversation with him?

Sinan Antoon: I’ll have to think about it

Paul Blezard: maybe for tomorrow.

Q: can I ask you Sinan, was there a particular sense from the publisher that you were both the author and the translator? Behind that surface question is a deeper one... I mean we have to be deeply thankful to publishers and editors for bringing works to the surface, but at the same time I’m so aware of many wonderful novels that have been denuded of their spirit or their meaning.

Sinan Antoon: I think that perhaps because I was the author and the translator the editor tried to do a double aggression against both!  There is always this sense that he would say “but this doesn’t happen in American novels” and to go back to your question I said “well this is an Iraqi novel being translated to English. I’m really happy to be published in English but I’m not interested in writing an American novel and this is not.”

But there are many examples ..so for example the word Allah is translated into God with a capital G. And he said why don’t we keep it as Allah. I said why keep it unless you want to give this sense of some distance. And he had problems with the erotic scenes, he wanted to cut down on the eroticism. On the one hand you complain that our background is Victorian and we give you the sex and you want to... I should say that the problem we have in the Arab world is that publishing houses don’t have editors. Sometimes I show .. to close friends and they function as editors. There is that problem but I don’t think editors should be too aggressive, especially when it comes to these kinds of decisions about, you know, keeping archaic language and this whole issue. The whole idea of writing it even in Arabic is that this world that seems distant then is so immediate. As someone was saying yesterday, a lot of people who are brought up as Shiites are not familiar with these rituals because unless you go and see them it doesn’t happen. And now in this atmosphere of sectarianism, it’s good for non-Shiites to read about these rituals of this community that’s supposed to be so alien and bizarre and to realise that it’s not that bizarre, it’s just human.

Paul Blezard: Let’s wrap it up like this: first of all, congratulations

Sinan Antoon: thank you

Paul Blezard: I think all the judges would agre that judging this year’s prize was an absolute pleasure, it was such a strong field. This is,  I think, an extraordinary novel. I think it will become the early 21st century Iraqi novel. I think it’s important. I think it’s beautifully written 

Sinan Antoon: ... you are creating a lot of enemies for me...!

Paul Blezard: I don’t care, you have to fight them off, I don’t. But there’s something else that this does. It kind of is perhaps why we judged it the way we judged it. For all that it draws upon a fantastic history and tradition, there is something incredibly approachable about this translation to a Western audience. A Western person who has no knowledge of Baghdad, or Shiism, or you, or Arabic culture really, could pick this up and enjoy it for the richness of the story and get so much.  And I think that’s why it’s a worthy winner and why we should be delighted to celebrate with you as you are given the prize tomorrow. So my question to you is this: you’ve had some fantastic reviews for this, but what does winning the prize mean to you? Because of course it does mean you now will have pressure to write The Corpse Washer 2 or whatever you call it.

Sinan Antoon: I’m really honoured and delighted. What it means is - and now I speak as a translator, and those of us who are literary translators know how literary translation is short-shrifted and how most of our labour is unrecognised and not rewarded - it’s an honour to win this prize, which is the only prize in the world specifically for Arabic literary translation. I’m honoured because it has in the past been honoured by amazingly good translators, so I’m really grateful to you and to the others. In writing, I try to learn from the masters that I admire about how not to keep doing the same thing. So after this novel I wrote a novel about a Christian family and the third novel is about two atheists. The pressure is always for a new one, it’s just to keep going and not to fall just into a mould basically and just do the expected.

Paul Blezard: and would you translate your own work again?

 Sinan Antoon: well this one really drained me emotionally to write and translate, so for Ya Maryam (Hail Mary)I have someone else to translate. Now I’ve regained some of my energy so I will translate my fourth novel.

a cheeky statement from ANTIBOOKCLUB:
ANTIBOOKCLUB goes too far with latest novel...
Shut out by its own industry, ANTIBOOKCLUB rises above The book no one would review just sold out within twelve hours of launching pre-orders... Without any advance reviews, without any money for promotion, without crowdfunding, and without any bookstores even so much as sniffing in their general direction: ANTIBOOKCLUB sold out its print edition of Amir Tag Elsir's disturbing novel French Perfume (in its English-language debut) in less than a day.

"It has been our intention from the start," says publisher Gabriel Levinson, "to prove to the book world that there is a better way to make and sell books. Some view this as arrogance, and perhaps there is a bit, but when every element of the industry we are devoted to shuns us from the playground--all because we choose to operate on our own terms (self-distribution, a sporadic book release schedule, grassroots marketing)--a bit of arrogance might be called for so as not to feel the crush of the Frown from Those On High."

Levinson, who was interviewed by no one and is writing this himself, fondled his sweater for fifteen minutes before hitting 'Send.' He is curious if anyone in the press will read this, but he isn't terribly concerned either.

On 23 April, the second anniversary of Kuwait writer Saud Alsanousi's winning of the  International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)  (also known as the Arabic Booker) for his novel The Bamboo Stalk,  Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) will publish Jonathan Wright's English translation. The novel's first-person narrator José is the son of a Filipina housemaid Josephine and a Kuwaiti journalist and writer Rashid, in whose mother's house she worked. Through this prism Alsanousi explores issues related not only to Kuwait, the Philippines and the predicament of immigrant labour, but more widely to questions of identity and the predicament of the "other". 

To mark publication of the English translation, Susannah Tarbush interviewed Saud Alsanousi.

It is now two years since you won IPAF for The Bamboo Stalk. Is it possible to summarise the difference that the prize has made to your life, as a writer or otherwise?

A lot has changed and here I am still reaping the benefits of the prize despite it having been two years since it was awarded to The Bamboo Stalk. My new novel Mama Hissa’s Mice was published a month ago and it immediately sold out in bookshops despite the censors issuing an order to remove and have it reassessed because of the sensitive topic it deals with. Despite this, the novel has been reprinted more than once within a month, and this couldn’t have happened without the trust of readers who encountered The Bamboo Stalk after the award was announced. The award was overwhelming at the start, but I soon overcame its effect and was able to return to writing about what occupies my mind and what I want to say – the way I want to say it – without becoming preoccupied with awards.


The English translation of The Bamboo Stalk is about to be published by BQFP. It would be interesting to know something about the process of translating the book from your perspective.

When I found out the translation of my novel had been assigned to British translator Jonathan Wright, I knew he would work very hard on it as I had been following his career in translation. We kept in touch via email and phone calls and he surprised me with questions that seemed unrelated to the text, but I soon understood his motive behind them, which is his keenness to establish a balance between the Arabic text and the discernment of the Western reader.

Jonathan doesn’t translate the words literally, stripping them of much of their meaning, instead he delves into the details and asks many questions to understand what is behind each word. So much so that I felt he was my partner in writing the story at times. I gave Jonathan complete freedom in changing some sentences as he saw fit without changing the main ideas. I imagine Jonathan’s efforts doubled so that he was acting as editor for some of the chapters as well as translator.

The English translation means that The Bamboo Stalk will reach a whole new readership. Presumably it means that many of the immigrant communities in Kuwait and elsewhere, and especially the Filipinos, will read it for the first time. Are you pleased about this? Could you say something about any launches that may be planned in addition to the event due to be held in London at Waterstones Piccadilly by BQFP and Banipal magazine on 29th April?

Of course it matters a great deal to me for the book to be widely read. However, setting aside the Kuwaiti-Filipino question, which is the subject of The Bamboo Stalk, I feel it’s much bigger than that. What I am presenting primarily is a question of identity. The problem of migrant workers is not the main idea although it is present in the story. The motivation behind the novel is the notion of accepting “the other” despite all the differences. It’s true that I wrote the novel on a character whose identity is fragmented between Kuwait and the Philippines, but this is a universal concern that touches upon the problem of the Mexican in the US or the Iraqi in Sweden. For this reason I don’t think about the Filipino in Kuwait specifically. The novel has been published in Kuwait, the Gulf and the Arab world, but I don’t have the slightest idea how it will be received by the English reader, although I do hope that it achieves similar resonance. I haven’t yet received invitations to events outside of the Arab world except for a literary festival in Berlin and one in Amsterdam. I believe the English translation will open new doors for me.



There hasn’t been any criticism or praise for the novel from the Philippines because it hasn’t yet been published in English. A few Filipino friends of mine who I met during my stay in the Philippines have read the English draft and were more responsive to the Kuwaiti part of the story because they are looking for something new. Conversely, the Kuwaiti or Arabic readers were welcoming of the Filipino part as it described a different life and culture. In Kuwait, people were divided: some disapproved of the religious questions, criticism of the police and the addressing of the Bidoon problem (nonspecific citizenships). Some thought I painted a negative picture of my country, especially after winning IPAF in 2013. However, the first prize the novel won was the National Prize in 2012, which is the most prestigious literary award in Kuwait, and I consider this an implicit recognition of the issues addressed in the story concerning some of the ideas and behaviours in my country.

What I aspire to primarily and have mentioned in many book clubs, is for my novel to influence a positive outcome. I believe The Bamboo Stalk has achieved this in changing the way we view “the other”. We barely know anything about Filipino workers aside from their being employees in restaurants and cafés. It’s for this reason that we don’t empathise with others’ pain; they are like robots to us. However, when the reader encounters in the first half of the story a nation that deals with poverty and one that has a rich culture and magnificent history we know little about, that perception begins to change completely. I’ve heard a number of stories about housewives who have changed the way they treat maids after reading the novel. I feel I am accomplishing a large part of what I’ve dreamt about when a woman told me: “I bought two smartphones, one for the maid and the other for her family in the Philippines so they can contact each other on Skype. Thank you for making me see”. I feel completely content even if I only wrote my novel for this one woman. All the voices that disapproved of the novel at the beginning have disappeared, and those who were affected by the novel continue to support it.


The novel is full of characters and interlocking stories and one imagines it would make a good adaptation for TV, film, radio or stage. Has there been discussion of such a possibility?

I received a number of offers for TV and feature film adaptations. However, I am hesitant about commercial projects and I always give the condition of being involved in the project for fear of it getting away from its main purpose. I’ve recently signed an initial contract with an important production company that is keen to produce the work and I stipulated the condition of overseeing the screenplay writing process.

There are female domestic workers from various countries in Kuwait. What led you to choose the Philippines rather than another country?

This is an important question. At the beginning I intended for the maid to be from India, for a number of reasons: Indian workers are in high numbers in Kuwait; it’s actually one of the first countries from which Kuwait imported workers; there is a long history between Kuwait and India in trade that stretches before the oil discovery; and I have always been fascinated by the Indian character, its cultural diversity and rich history. However, the plan changed because if Rashid al-Tarouf had a son with an Indian maid, the son wouldn’t look strikingly different from Kuwaitis. Only the Asian features would have enabled me to portray the idea behind the novel, because José Mendoza’s appearance is part of his struggle; people and the family do not accept him because he looks different. This is illustrated in the passage where José is at the airport in Kuwait and is scolded by a passport officer for not standing in the workers’ queue: “He turned me away when he saw my face, even before he had a chance to see my passport.”

The novel seems to include a plea for religious tolerance and diversity, and a kind of universality. José is spiritually open, and is drawn to Christian, Muslim and Buddhist religious buildings and to meditation in natural surroundings. Some of his Kuwaiti friends - the high-spirited “crazies” whom he first met when they were holidaying in the Philippines - are Shiite, some Sunni, and he notices the different ways they pray alongside each other. Was a message of tolerance something you wanted to get across?

The message is very clear. All believers agree, in one way or another, on a god. All religions, in essence, advocate peace, positive behaviour and refraining from sin. Yet we’ve taken to being distracted from our religion in order to scrutinise others, and gave ourselves the right to determine who is to go to heaven and hell. José, despite his simplicity and young age, understood the essence of religion through his experience when he arrived at a truth he believes in after visiting a church, Buddhist temple and mosque: “In my right ear I heard the call to prayer, in my left ear the ringing of church bells. The smell of incense from the Buddhist temples hit my nostrils.” He referred to his heartbeat and said: “I knew that God was there.” He read about different religions and grew fond of them, yet he almost turned away because of people’s behaviour. Finally arriving at the conclusion that “Religions are bigger than their adherents.” Thus recognising that the basis of religion is one’s relationship with his/her god.

For many readers the novel will be their first ever encounter with fiction set in Kuwait or the Philippines. Do you think literature can tell us more than, say, a sociological study? 

I don’t think it’s about which can tell us more, but rather which is more expressive and which can evoke closeness, empathy and enjoyment in the reader. Literature provides these opportunities for readers in the interaction it offers them with characters and events. Specialists can write reports full of numbers and facts, but literature, and only literature, delves deep and gives you a human experience. It touches upon emotion and logic together and makes you think, cry, laugh or even regret. I believe this is something studies cannot achieve regardless of their significance.

While researching the Philippines angle, did you find much useful material via the internet and other sources or was a trip there absolutely essential? And  did you penetrate Philippine society in Kuwait?

Yes, I went through a lot of reference in books and searched the internet but felt that everything I wrote was cold and devoid of emotion. My early writing resembled – to a large extent – surveys and reports that I’ve published in newspapers and magazines. So I stopped researching, and because I didn’t have any Filipino friends, I made the important decision of travelling to the Philippines to experience it in real life. This provided me with a great opportunity to discover the country, the people, and a culture that is completely different to mine. I wouldn’t have been able to portray José Mendoza without living in a house that looked like his, walked the roads he walked, attended the funerals and weddings he attended, and grew close to those around him. Since my return to Kuwait, and as soon as I landed in the airport, I’ve seen things in a completely different way. I wasn’t Alsanousi at all. I was José and it was as if I was discovering Kuwait for the first time.


It is intriguing to read about Josephine’s meeting with the real life Kuwaiti writer Ismail Fahd Ismail, from whom she learns of Rashid’s role in the resistance, and his capture. Is Ismail Fahd Ismail's time in the Philippines, and his writing a study of the resistance, based in fact - and why did you decide to introduce him into the book?

 After the Iraqi invasion, Ismail Fahd Ismail travelled to the Philippines to write a novel about the occupation. He needed to get away temporarily in order to write with clarity. Because he felt an urgency in the topic, he chose geographical distance from Kuwait, and spent around six years in the Philippines so that he could write objectively.

Ismail’s presence in the story lends it an unsettling distance. He is the one who raises the questions in the reader of whether Josephine really did meet Ismail; whether or not the story is real; and whether Rashid is one of the characters featured in Ismail’s biographical writing whilst in the Philippines. This is why I introduced Ismail Fahd Ismail in the story, as well as for other reasons I will keep to myself. I think any novelist tries as much as possible to create characters that the reader genuinely believes to be real. This is what drove a number of readers to actually search for José. The Filipino embassy in Kuwait received many phone calls enquiring about Ibrahim Salam (José’s friend, the novels’ translator into Arabic who works in the embassy in the story), as well as Ismail Fahd Ismail and a number of other realistic characters and events that took place in Kuwait. All of which perplexed the readers and made some believe that what they are reading is a true story. To this day, I refuse to answer the question: is this a true story?

You would have been very young at the time of the 1990/91 Iraqi invasion and war. Do you remember much from those times? Rashid and his friend Ghassan were both in the resistance, and the book is a reminder of a period that is perhaps remembered less – at least, outside Kuwait – than it should be. How are the invasion, occupation and war remembered now, and what was their lasting impact on society?

Yes, I was nine exactly when the invasion began. When my family reads what I write they say “you’ve been saved by your memory!” I have a great amount of visual memories and this is because I grew up in a family house or “the big house” as we call it in Kuwait, with my grandmother, my parents as well as sixteen uncles, aunts and their children. Imagine the number of personalities and stories I’ve encountered since birth. The big house is the main reason why I became a novelist; because of the diversity of characters, the fond memories I have with each person I lived with, and because of my grandmother’s stories and legends. As for the impact of war, it’s something we cannot overcome despite twenty five years having passed, but I think I have tried as much as I could and succeeded to a degree. Perhaps Mendoza, José’s grandfather, was right to an extent when he said “‘War isn’t just the fighting on the battlefield…but also the war that’s fought in the minds of those who take part. The first ends, the second goes on and on.” My next novel Mama Hissa’s Mice explores this idea in more depth.

Your first novel Prisoner of Mirrors won the Laila al-Othman Prize and was excerpted in the Fiction from Kuwait special feature in Banipal issue 47, in translation by Sophia Vasalou. Are there plans to translate the whole novel into English?

Prisoner of Mirrors was my first attempt at a novel. I have no plans for translating it. As with any first attempt, I imagine it has many shortcomings. Not to say that I regret the experience in any way, because it was a real education in helping me overcome writing obstacles that I would experience later on. I often look for the motivation behind any piece of writing, and in the case of Prisoner of Mirrors I wrote it because I wanted to write, which I don’t think is enough of a reason. I wrote The Bamboo Stalk because I felt pained by the image others hold of us and I wanted to raise readers’ awareness. In my last novel, I was motivated by fear of a bleak future that possibly awaits us if we continue being blinded by extreme religious and sectarian outlooks.

In 2011 your short story "The Bonsai and the Old Man" won a competition organized by Al-Arabi magazine and BBC Arabic. Do you continue to write short fiction?

I do hope to write short stories, or novellas, because I am haunted by many stories and characters that stretch over a vast period of time and for this reason I prefer writing novels. I hope to succeed one day in writing a story about a few characters on a specific topic, which is a very difficult task for me.

Please tell us about your recently-published new novel and how it relates to your previous two novels. Are there any plans to translate it?

In my new novel Mama Hissa’s Mice, Hissa is the grandmother in the story, the teller of myths and legends. In all her stories mice are a symbol of strife and ruin. I don’t think I can sum up the story in a few words; it took me two years and nine months to complete it. If I was to describe it generally, I would say it is set in Kuwait and spans over forty years, beginning with the Iranian Revolution, to the first Gulf War (Iraq and Iran), the second Gulf War (Iraq and Kuwait), the third Gulf War (the falling of Baghdad), concluding in a fictional period in the year 2020 following what is referred to as the Arab Spring.

It’s about three boys who are friends and neighbours, and tells of the social changes borne out of political shifts and the wars that take on a religious and sectarian character, even in neighbouring countries. It describes how these changes have a direct impact on our behaviour, our ways of thinking and the nature of our relationships with each other as Sunnis and Shiites. It’s a story of four generations: the empathetic grandmothers’ generation; their sons’ generation which is torn between Arabist slogans and blind sectarian affiliations; and the grandsons’ generation (ours), which is the most volatile and detached from its environment. The latter is a deformed generation, having been raised as Arabists but renounced their Arabism – or rather it renounced them - after the second Gulf War. This is the period during which the West, led by the US, became the saviour and we became more American than the Americans themselves. Finally, the fourth generation (the great grandsons), who live in a fictional time. I haven’t yet received any offer for translating the novel. It was published just a month ago.

You have a remarkable track record of recognition for your writing. When and how did you start writing, and how did you learn the craft? And, as a contributor to newspapers, how does your journalistic writing relate to your fiction; does it contribute to the clear and precise yet expressive and lyrical character of your fiction? Are you part of a Kuwaiti  “literary scene”?

At the beginning, I encountered difficulty in being accepted in the literary world of Kuwait because I did not belong to a certain literary or cultural group. I wasn’t a member of the Writers Association or any known or unknown initiative and I never took part in courses or workshops. Reading as well as travelling are what taught me to write as well as my natural inclination; I was very inquisitive from a young age and tended to stop to observe the things other people didn’t. It’s hard to determine how I became a novelist because I’ve written in private from a very young age. I wrote about how I feel towards others without telling them. I thanked, cursed or expressed my feelings towards them and my fear of losing them, especially my grandmother. All my feelings were on paper and I used to read a great deal, which was worrying to my parents at times when I would spend long hours in my room away from people. I then published some works on the internet and newspapers but to my parents writing seemed like a waste of time and they refused to give me an office to use for my books and reading. After it was announced that I had won the Laila al-Othman Prize my father said to my mother: “It’s fine for him to take over the office”. They realised that writing is a life-long project to me rather than a pastime. My journalistic writing does not affect my creative writing because most of my published work is literary. I also avoid publishing anything in the newspaper whilst working on a novel, which helps me balance the two.

How important is reading to you. Who do you read, and who are you reading at the moment?

Reading is everything to me. I can’t imagine myself without a book, to the extent where I take four or five books with me even on three-day trips, for fear of not enjoying one or having to extend my stay and not having enough to read. I can’t imagine anything that could give me the experiences books have alongside travelling. I recently read Kafka on the Shore by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Since finishing it, I never ceased cursing it – cursing it affectionately! – for the pleasant experience it has given me, both while reading and afterwards.

Do you still have a “day job” in addition to your writing career, or are you now a full-time writer? Do you think it can be helpful for a fiction writer to have a “day job” to keep in touch with day-to-day life? – as well as to bring in an income!

If the Arab writer left his/her job to write they would starve to death. I have my permanent job, as writing does not generate enough income in the Arab world due to the low readership compared to other countries, as well as the piracy problem and forged books that are sold in some Arab countries. My job doesn’t create an obstacle for me as it helps me organise my time. Besides, the work atmosphere exposes me to a lot of stories and people from different cultures, which I find my inspiration in.

What are you working on now in terms of writing?

I am working on some notes for the next project; writing down ideas and details of times and places, as well as character profiles. It’s still at a very early stage as I am currently engrossed in Mama Hissa’s Mice.

Parliamentary candidate Dr Rod Abouharb fights for Labour in London’s Kensington constituency
by Susannah Tarbush
[An Arabic version of this article appeared in Al-Hayat newspaper on 22 April 2015:
http://bit.ly/1E9J92T ]

The campaign for the 7 May British general election began officially on 30 March, the day parliament was dissolved. But for Dr Rod Abouharb campaigning had begun in November 2013, after the Labour Party chose him as its parliamentary candidate in the London constituency of Kensington. By the end of March Dr Abouharb and his Labour team had knocked on over 30,000 doors in Kensington and had had conversations with more than 5,000 residents, in their “listening to Kensington” initiative. Now they are in the middle of the hectic final period of campaigning.

Abouharb, who is 40 this year, is the son of a Syrian father and English mother: his first name Rod is short for the Arabic “Rodwan”. He was born in Cardiff, capital of Wales, and spent the first five years of his life in Syria. He is a senior lecturer in International Relations at University College, London.

Kensington’s inhabitants include many voters of Arab and other Middle Eastern origin, ranging from the Moroccan community – located around Golborne Road in North Kensington –to wealthy Arab bankers and business people.

The constituency has extremes of wealth and poverty. Dr Abouharb points out that in some areas of deprived north Kensington men have a life expectancy of only 63 years; while in parts of the affluent south of the constituency it is 92 years. Abouharb is determined to promote fairness and equality and pledges that as an MP he will make sure the needs of vulnerable and less affluent Kensington residents are represented in parliament.



Kensington is generally regarded as a safe Conservative seat. In the 2010 general election, the former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind won the seat for the Conservatives by a majority of 8,616 votes. He got 17,595 votes, 50.1 per cent of the total, while Labour got 25.5 per cent and the Liberal Democrats 19.6 per cent.

However, these are unpredictable times in British politics. And the Kensington Labour Party points out that around a third of Labour supporters generally do not vote on election day. If every Labour supporter in Kensington were to vote on 7 May, and if there is also a swing towards Labour from the Liberal Democrats and some others, then it would be possible for Abouharb to win the Kensington seat

The 7 May election is taking place at a time when public trust in politicians and MPs is very low. And there is much criticism of the fact that an increasing number of MPs are “career politicians” who have spent all their working lives inside the “Westminster bubble” around parliament. They are felt by many voters to be out of touch with the issues facing ordinary people.

Abouharb told Al-Hayat that he decided to stand as a Labour candidate because he was frustrated with the way career politicians behave. “I got tired of yelling at the television, and of saying ‘well, I can’t do worse than any of this lot.’ I thought I had something to offer.”

He thinks there should be more candidates like him, “a normal person who actually has a career and is more than happy to buck the status quo and say what he thinks.” And he wants to change how decisions are made in the UK. “We must make choices based on evidence, not ideology, that improve the lives of hardworking families in all our communities.” 

Abouharb did his first degree in Politics and Modern History at Brunel University in London. He then won scholarships to attend two New York State universities in the USA: he did his MA in Political Science at University at Buffalo, and got his PhD in 2005 from Binghamton University.

While doing his first degree at Brunel he went to the US to work for Senator Spencer Abraham as part of an exchange internship programme. “He was the only Arab-American senator in the US Senate at that point,” Abouharb says. “He was actually a Republican, but the fascinating thing was that all the Arab issues –all the Palestinian, all the Israeli issues – came through his office.” At the time Abouharb was writing his undergraduate dissertation about finding a just solution for the city of Jerusalem. In his second year at Brunel he gained experience working for an MP when he did research for Gwilym Jones , a Conservative MP in Cardiff. “He was a Welsh Office minister at that point, and it was very interesting to see what was going on.”


Abouharb’s expertise in international relations, and his concern for human rights and social justice, are reflected in his election campaign. He says: “Kensington’s diverse population is especially concerned with international issues. An equitable and just solution for Palestine is a lynchpin of broader peace in the Middle East. A Palestinian state based on the 1967 ceasefire lines would be an important first step.”

He told Al-Hayat that the UK government should to do more to help with the “very fluid and very complicated” situation in Syria. “The United Kingdom has a responsibility to protect civilians, as do all other governments, and I think there is much more we could do, not only by properly funding refugee camps and helping neighbouring countries cope with a huge influx of people but also by re-settling Syrians, in much higher numbers than we have done so far, here in the UK.”

In what Abouharb describes as the “shocking and heartrending” response of the UK government, so far only 143 Syrian refugees have been resettled in the UK – far behind the figure of 30,000 in Germany. Asked whether British airstrikes against ISIS should be extended from Iraq to Syria, he says “I think the options about whether we engage in airstrikes against ISIS in Syria should be done with our regional and international partners if there is a military need to do so.”


When Abouharb applied to be considered as a Labour Party candidate, he had been a member of the party for just over the one year that is necessary to qualify to apply. After he applied he was shortlisted for several constituencies; hewas  chosen for Kensington after being interviewed against two other shortlisted candidates.

Why does he think Kensington selected him? “One of the things that got reported back to me was my willingness to tell them the things I disagreed with in terms of Labour Party policy,” Abouharb says. “I listed quite a few.” He and the Kensington Labour Party currently disagree with Labour’s policy of introducing a “mansion tax” on homes worth more than £2 million. The money raised would go the National Health Service (NHS).

Recent years have seen an explosion in house prices in London, particularly in Kensington. In a recent column for getwestlondon, Abouharb warned that Kensington was becoming an "elephant's graveyard" of ovepriced overseas-owned homes. He said that during their doorstep encounters with thousands of Kensington residents, he and his campaign team had found residents' greatest concern to be housing. He noted that "6,000 homes are owned by companies registered in tax havens. They do not contribute to our communities, use our shops and restaurants, or pay tax." He told Al-Hayat: "We would make sure that those on modest incomes, those on the 20 per cent tax threshold, do not pay this high value property tax. We would rather see a property tax that includes many more bands so those with high value properties pay progressively more.”

Until recently, Sir Malcolm Rifkind had been due to stand again in Kensington as the Conservative candidate. But on 24 February he resigned as chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, and withdrew as the Kensington candidate. This was after he was secretly filmed by Channel 4 TV and the Telegraph newspaper offering a bogus Chinese company personal introductions to his high-level contacts, such as ambassadors, in return for a fee of £5,000 to £8,000 for half a day’s work. The affair became known as the “cash for access” scandal. Rifkind claimed he had done nothing wrong although he admitted making an “error of judgement”.


There was anger that Sir Malcolm told the supposed representatives of the bogus Chinese company that he was “self-employed” and that no one paid him a salary – when in fact taxpayers were paying him the MP’s salary of £67,060 Sterling a year, plus a further £14,876 as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Rifkind also told the fake company representatives: “you would be surprised how much free time I have”, and that he spent a lot of time reading and walking.

Even before the “cash for access” scandal Abouharb had attacked Rifkind over his private business interests. “Ever since I’ve been a candidate we’ve been talking about Rifkind’s multiple jobs and how much money he was bringing in with these non-executive directorships,” he told Al-Hayat. “It was clear that his office was a money-making scheme.”

 Abouharb wrote on his blog that Rifkind admitted to earning around £262,000 a year in non-executive directorships and consultancies and was spending a “vast amount of time on non-executive directorships”. Abouharb added: “Many believe this is a clear conflict of interests, particularly on issues of security and healthcare, and detracts from his responsibilities as an MP.” He described Rifkind as “the invisible MP".

After Rifkind’s withdrawal as Kensington’s Conservative candidate he was replaced by Lady Victoria Borwick, who was deputy mayor of London Mayor Boris Johnson. If she is elected as an MP she intends to remain a member of the Greater London Authority, with a salary of £53,439 a year in addition to her MP’s salary.

Abouharb is sharply critical of her decision to stay as a member of the Greater London Authority even if elected as an MP. He says the residents of Kensington “deserve a full-time dedicated MP who has only one job.” He has arranged with University College to take unpaid leave from his job if elected, “so that I can act as a full time representative for all the residents of Kensington .“ And he has promised not to take any paid company directorships. He pledges: “I will be a visible and accessible MP with a full-time staffed office in Kensington.” And he will hold regular surgeries across the constituency.

Abouharb’s parents met in northern England in the mid-1960s when his father was doing his PhD in civil engineering at the University of Manchester and his mother was doing a degree at Nursing School. His father then taught at Birmingham’s Aston University for a time before the couple went to live in Syria. Abouharb’s mother was one of very few British people living in Damascus at that time.

After Abouharb was born in Cardiff in 1975 his mother flew with him back to Damascus when he was six weeks old. “Apparently I ended up going first class because the stewardesses liked me so much ,” Abouharb says. He remembers going to nursery school in Syria, and speaking Arabic and French as well as English. But his parents got divorced and in 1981 his mother returned to Cardiff with Rod and his brother.

While the two boys were growing up, their mother often cooked favourite dishes from Syria. “We would spend time making tabouleh from scratch, hummous, babba ghanough, and lots of lamb dishes with garlic, and Kufta kababs. We would find shops that sold Arab pastries and sweets; I remember a particular Persian supermarket in Cardiff had a wonderful selection."

Abouharb’s father died in Syria around 18 months ago.“We’d actually been trying to get him out of Damascus, but it was effectively impossible when the embassies closed”.

Abouharb describes himself as coming from "a modest background” and says “my mother worked hard as a nurse to excel in her career, put food on our table and create a warm and supportive family environment.” He believes that this background gives him “a keen understanding of the challenges faced each day by individuals and families in this country, and this really helps me to understand and to represent our diverse and mixed communities in Kensington.”


Many voters are extremely concerned by the deteriorating state of the National Health Service (NHS) after five years of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. He pledges that if he is elected as an MP “I will campaign to prevent the backdoor privatisation of the NHS.”

Abouharb’s passion for supporting the NHS is at least partly due to the fact that many members of his family have worked in it. “My mum was an orthopaedic nurse, my uncle on my mum’s side was a geneticist, my brother and sister-in-law are both general practitioner doctors working in Essex,” he says. In addition, “On my father’s side of the family I have two uncles living in Vienna who are also both general practitioners.”

He says: “I very much had a first-hand experience of the NHS growing up with both my mum and uncle working in the local Heath hospital in Cardiff. I could see the importance of both what my mum and uncle did in helping many people especially babies.” He says the NHS is an amazing institution which provides wonderful care for so many people. “We do, however, need to fund it properly and that is critical as our population ages, and new and expensive drugs that improve the well being of patients become available.” He thinks there is money to fund the NHS long-term, for example in the form of the many tens of billions of pounds in avoided, evaded and uncollected tax.

Tomorrow - on the second anniversary of young Kuwait writer Saud Alsanousi's winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)  (also known as the Arabic Booker) for his novel The Bamboo Stalk, - Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) publishes Jonathan Wright's English translation of the book.

To mark the publication of the translation, Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature and Waterstones Piccadilly - the flagship store of the Waterstones chain, and the largest bookstore in Europe - have jointly organised a launch at 6.30pm on Wednesday 29 April,

The venue is:
4th floor,
Waterstone's Piccadilly,
203/206 Piccadilly,
London W1J 9HD

The English translation of The Bamboo Stalk is reviewed in Banipal's current issue. In addition, this blog recently published an interview with Saud Alsanousi.

Daring and bold, The Bamboo Stalk confronts universal problems of identity, ethnicity and religion through its protagonist Kuwaiti-Filipino José, born to a Filipino mother and a Kuwaiti father whom he never met. In his late teens he travels from the Philippines to Kuwait and tries to get to know his Kuwaiti family.

Ten years after Nigerian author Segun Afolabi won the 2005 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story "Monday Morning", it was announced today that he is among the five writers shortlisted for this year's prize. The Prize is awarded for a short story of 3,000-10,000 words by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere.




Afolabi is shortlisted for “The Folded Leaf” published by London-based Wasafiri magazine in 2014. Since winning the Caine Prize he has won further acclaim as a writer of both long and short fiction: his collection of short stories A Life Elsewherewas published in 2006 followed by the novel Goodbye Lucille in 2007.

Afolabi's fellow-Nigerian Elnathan John is shortlisted for “Flying” which appeared in 2014 in Per Contra, the international journal of the arts, literature and ideas, in 2014. John was first shortlisted for the Caine Prize in  2013, for “Bayan Layi".


The strong record of Nigerian and South African writers in Caine Prize shortlists is maintained in the 2015, which includes two writers from each country. One of the South African writers is F. T. Kola, shortlisted for  “A Party for the Colonel” published by One Story magazine of Brooklyn, New York City in 2014.

The other South African, Masande Ntshanga, is shortlisted for “Space”, published in Twenty in 20 (Times Media, South Africa, 2014).



The fifth shortlisted writer  is Namwali Serpell of Zambia, whose story “The Sack” was published in the anthology Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara (Bloomsbury, London, 2014). Serpell was shortlisted for the Caine Pirze in 2010 for “Muzungu”.


The judges for this year's Caine Prize are - in addition to the chair Zoë Wicomb - award-winning Indian novelist Neel Mukherjee; Zimbabwean novelist, short-story writer and 2004 Caine Prize winner Brian Chikwava; Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown Universit Cóilín Parsons, and Sudanese-British TV and radio journalist Zeinab Badawi.

Wicomb said:  "For all the variety of themes and approaches, the shortlist has in common a rootedness in socio-economic worlds that are pervaded with affect, as well as keen awareness of the ways in which the ethical is bound up with aesthetics. Unforgettable characters, drawn with insight and humour, inhabit works ranging from classical story structures to a haunting, enigmatic narrative that challenges the conventions of the genre."

Wicomb added, "Understatement and the unspoken prevail: hints of an orphan’s identity bring poignant understanding of his world; the reader is slowly and expertly guided to awareness of a narrator’s blindness; there is delicate allusion to homosexual love; a disfigured human body is encountered in relation to adolescent escapades; a nameless wife’s insecurities barely mask her understanding of injustice; and, we are given a flash of insight into dark passions that rise out of a surreal resistance culture."

 "Above all, these stories speak of the pleasure of reading fiction. It will be no easy task to settle on a winner."
The stories will be published in New Internationalist’s Caine Prize 2015 Anthology in July and through co-publishers across Africa, who receive a print ready PDF free of charge from New Internationalist. Last year's anthology is entitled  The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2014.

In April 2015, twelve writers from eight African countries convened in Ghana as part of the Caine Prize’s writers’ workshop. During the workshop, the writers were expected to write short stories for the 2015 Caine Prize anthology. During the 13 days of the workshop the writers wrote, read and discussed work in progress under the mentorship of Leila Aboulela, the Sudanese author who won the inaugural Caine Prize in 2000, and has since become an internationally renowned author, and South African novelist and journalist Zukiswa Wanner.

The Caine Prize for African Writing is named in celebration of the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc, who was Chairman of the 'Africa 95' arts festival in Europe and Africa in 1995 and for nearly 25 years Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee.  
Susannah Tarbush, London

The Italian by Tunisian author Shukri Mabkhout wins 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 



statement issued by IPAF:
The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout was tonight announced as the winner of the eighth International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). The novel,  published by Dar Tanweer Tunis, was named winner by this year’s Chair of Judges, award-winning Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Barghouti, at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi. In addition to winning $50,000 - plus the $10,000 that goes to each shortlisted writer - Shukri Mabkhout is guaranteed an English translation of his novel, as well as an expected increase in book sales and international recognition. The announcement took place on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The Prize is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA Abu Dhabi).

Set in Tunis, The Italian tells the story of Abdel Nasser, nicknamed ‘the Italian’ due to his good looks. Against the backdrop of the protagonist’s political and amatory exploits, the book sheds light on Tunisia’s recent complex history, in particular the troubled transition from the Bourguiba era to the government of Ben Ali in the late 1980s.

In a recent interview, Mabkhout told how he was inspired to write the novel by the events of the Arab Spring: ‘Two years into the revolution... I remembered a recent period of Tunisia’s history that is similar in its fears, changes and conflicts to what I was witnessing and living: it was the period of transition from the reign of Bourguiba to that of Ben Ali following the 1987 coup.’

Mabkhout, who has just turned 53, was born in Tunis in 1962 and currently resides there, where he is President of Manouba University. A well-known academic and intellectual, he has written several works of literary criticism, but this is his first novel. The Italian was selected as the best work of fiction published within the last 12 months, selected from 180 entries from 15 countries across the Arab World.


On behalf of the 2015 judging panel, Mourid Barghouti comments: ‘The whole of Shukri Mabkhout's debut novel is as astonishing as its first chapter: piquing the reader’s interest through a mysterious event in the opening scene, the book gradually reveals the troubled history of its characters and a particular period in Tunisia’s history. The hero, Abdel Nasser, is complex and multi-faceted and even the minor characters are convincing and we believe the logic of their actions. However, his most striking creation is that of Zina, Abdel Nasser’s wife: skilfully rendered as a blend of confidence and diffidence; harshness and love; strength and fragility. She is a highly individual character who, rather than being pre-conceived, clearly developed during the act of writing.

‘The novel brilliantly depicts the unrest both of the small world of its characters and the larger one of the nation, as well as exploring themes of personal desire, the establishment, violation and opportunism. Whilst it lifts the lid on Tunisian society, the book may also surprise many of its Arab readers who may recognise aspects of their societies in its pages too. Gripping the read from the first line to the last, The Italian is a work of art and an important contribution to Tunisian, and Arab, literary fiction.’

The five other shortlisted finalists were also honoured at the ceremony, and each received  $10,000. The shortlisted titles were A Suspended Life (Al-Ahlia) by Palestinian Atef Abu Saif;  Floor 99 (Difaf Publications) by Jana ElHassan of Lebanon;  Diamonds and Women(Dar al-Adab) by Lina Hawyan Elhassan of Syria; Willow Alley (Al-Markez al-Thaqafi al-Arabi) by Ahmed el-Madini of Morocco and The Longing of the Dervish(Dar al-Ain) by Hammour Ziada of Sudan.

The shortlist was announced by the judging panel in February at a press conference at the Royal Mansour Hotel, Casablanca, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture of Morocco and the Casablanca International Book Fair.  In addition to Mourid Barghouti, the judges were Ayman A. El-Desouky, an Egyptian academic, lecturer on Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS; Parween Habib, a poet, critic, and media expert; Najim A. Kadhim, an Iraqi critic and academic, Professor of Comparative Literature at Baghdad University; and Kaoru Yamamoto, a Japanese academic, translator and researcher.


Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of IPAF Trustees, comments: ‘The Italian is an accomplished novel. It never lets go of the reader who willingly follows its intriguing characters on their converging and diverging journeys through a world full of incremental surprises. Set in Tunis in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel meanders in multiple directions to create a complex picture of a world that resonates in the present.

'Mabkhout is a master of suspense. He does so in standard Arabic that is full of vitality and pathos, thereby defying the unfair criticism that the Arabic language is a bookish and fossilised mode of expression at odds with the modern world. Mabkhout is not only a great narrator; he is also a master of an elevated language that breathes life into every word he pens.’

Delivering on its aim to increase the international reach of Arabic fiction, the Prize has guaranteed English translations for all of its winners - 2008- Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (Egypt): 2009 - Azazeel by Youssef Ziedan (Egypt); 2010 - Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Abdo Khal (Saudi Arabia): 2011- The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari (Morocco) and The Doves' Necklace by Raja Alem (Saudi Arabia): 2012 - The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber (Lebanon): 2013 - The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi (Kuwait): 2014 - Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq).

Since 2008, the winning and shortlisted IPAF books have been translated into over 20 languages. The 2014 winner, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, has secured English publication with Oneworld in the UK and Penguin Books in the US. It is set to be published in Autumn 2016. Saud Alsanousi’s 2013 winning entry The Bamboo Stalk (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing) was published in the UK in April 2015 in English translation by Jonathan Wright. 

review by Susannah Tarbush 

Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate
by Abdel Bari Atwan
Saqi Books, London. 256 pages. Hbk and eBook
ISBN: 978-0-86356-195-5
eISBN: 978-0-86356-101-6

Nearly a year on from Iraqi jihadist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘s declaration of a caliphate, with himself as caliph, Islamic State (IS) has shown itself to be remarkably resilient despite setbacks from time to time. It controls almost half of half of Syria and at least a third of Iraq: an area the size of Britain. Despite the air strikes and other measures against it by the US-led alliance, IS continues to make gains. It recently captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.

The 2 June conference in Paris attended by ministers or their representative from 24 countries in the anti-IS coalition reflected the deep concern over efforts to defeat IS. The conference also brought into focus the lack of a coherent and effective strategy against IS, despite the surely over-optimistic claims by certain US and other participants. 

IS is linking up with other jihadist movements around the world, and has established a strong foothold in Libya, just over the Mediterranean from Europe. It is attracting hundreds of young Muslims from Western and other countries, and there are regular instances in the UK of young British nationals being arrested or charged in relation to terror offences related to Syria or Iraq.

IS’s conquests, and its behaviour in areas it controls, are accompanied by a catalogue of atrocities.  Its massacres, tortures, beheadings and destruction are carefully recorded and widely disseminated on videos whose grotesque choreography and production skills are routinely described in the media as “slick”.

unlikely that IS would have existed without digital technology

The Palestinian journalist and author Abdel Bari Atwan alludes to IS's adept use of all forms of social media and other digital platforms in the title of his book Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, published recently in London by Saqi Books. Atwan writes: “Without digital technology it is highly unlikely that Islamic State would ever have come into existence, let along been able to survive and expand.”

It is just 10 years since the video-sharing site YouTube was created, transforming the world of social media. IS and its forerunner organisations have shown themselves adept at using the whole panoply of digital and social media. Atwan says it is paradoxical that a group which aims to take the world back to the days of the “Righteous Caliphs” – the first generations of Muslims –should be so dependent on the most sophisticated and modern technology. "But in war people use every weapon at their disposal", and the  leaders and foot soldiers of IS are 21st century men who have been brought up with computers, mobile phones and social networking platforms as part of their natural environment.

A pioneer in the use of digital technology to record jihadi operations and spread videos with a jihadist message was the Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who became Al-Qa’ida’s emir in Iraq. Zarqawi also led the way in the kind of gruesome violence now characteristic of IS. In May 2004 he personally beheaded 26-year-old American businessman Nick Berg, who was dressed in the type of orange jumpsuit similar to those of men in US custody. The video of Berg's murder caused shockwaves far beyond Iraq. Zarqawi was killed by the Americans in 2006, but his legacy remains. In a chilling sign of what is to befall them, a number of  IS's captives or hostages have been dressed in orange jumpsuits for their videoed murders.

The American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was prominent in Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula until his death in a US drone attack of 2011, further developed the digital side of jihadism. He encouraged the use of social media such as blogs, Facebook and YouTube to disseminate jihadist material and indoctrinate new recruits.


Over the past two decades Abdel Bari Atwan has been a prominent writer and commentator on the global jihadi movement. In 1996 he spent 72 hours with Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden in his Tora Bora cave complex. Saqi Books published three of his previous books: The Secret History of Al-Qa’ida (2006); After bin Laden: Al-Qa’ida, The Next Generation (2012), and the memoir A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page (2012).

Atwan was editor -in-chief of the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi for 25 years and now edits the Rai al-Youm website, which claims to be the Arab world’s first Huffington Post-style outlet. He contributes to various newspapers including the Guardian and in Scotland the Herald. He often appears on TV and radio, and is a frequent guest on the BBC TV show Dateline London, whose presenter Gavin Esler contributed the comment on the front cover of Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate:“A brave and important book ... a must-read.”

articles on IS attract "ten times the readership of other articles"

In his exhaustively-researched book Atwan draws on a variety of sources, contacts and correspondents, some of them close to IS. He also draws on contributions to Rai al-Youm, observing that articles on IS attract ten times the readership of other articles, and hundreds of comments, “most of them expressing positive views of Islamic State.”
  
Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate has been receiving a considerable amount of attention. In May Atwan discussed his book at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts and at the Bradford Literature Festival. On 17 June he is due to appear in London at a Chatham House panel discussion on “ISIS: Marketing Terror” together with David Butter, Chatham House Associate Fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Programme, and Sarah Khan, Director of Inspire. The event will be chaired by BBC investigative reporter Peter Taylor OBE.

The  rise, structure and operations of IS presents a complex and often confusing picture. Atwan’s clearly-written and thorough account is a highly informative guide. On the practical level, it is  somewhat marrred for those reading the print rather than the digital edition by the fact that the many footnotes are geared to the digital edition, consisting solely of internet addresses, some of them three of four lines long. But at least the book has a comprehensive index - unlike one of the other recently-published key books on ISIS and IS.

Atwan puts IS in its historical and regional context, covering in detail its origins in Iraq, and Syria, and among the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, with both of which there are connections and rivalries.He notes that when al-Baghdadi declared himself Caliph and Emir al-Muminin (Commander of the Faithful) on 1 July 2014, following the capture of Mosul, many commentators overlooked the important fact that the position had already been occupied by Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, since 1996. “This ‘battle of the caliphs’ is at the heart of current jihadist politics,” he writes.

The development of IS's rivalry with Jabhat al Nusra is examined. Jabhat al-Nusra was formed by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani after Baghdadi dispatched him to Syria for this purpose in summer 2011. After the divide appeared between ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the latter pledging its allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Al-Jolani has been in the news in the past few days after he gave an interview with the Al-Jazeera TV channel in which he was highly critical of IS, describing it as "illegitimate". There was much scepticism over his apparent attempt to portray Jahbat al-Nusra as relatively moderate, and some Arab commentators condemned Al-Jazeera for conducting the interview with a terror leader.

the crucial role of Saddam's former military personnel in IS Atwan repeatedly highlights the importance of former members of Saddam’s military to IS’s structure and operations. The previously secular Saddam had himself realised that Islam could be a rallying cry against the West and at the height of UN sanctions he launched a 'Faith Campaign' supervised by his deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Saddam ordered his army commanders to become practising Muslims, and he tolerated the presence of a small jihadist enclave, Ansar al-Islam, near the border with Iran. Atwan says: "Unbeknown to Saddam, al-Qa'ida had sent some of its own operatives into this enclave. They were instructed to make valuable connections with the newly Islamised army commanders from Saddam's brigades."

After the 2003  invasion, these regular Iraqi army personnel became crucial in the insurgency against the occupiers and to the various Islamist organisations, and eventually to IS.  Today, officers from Saddam's military and security cadres serve IS as experts in key fields such as manufacturing IEDs, security issues and intelligence. "These professional soldiers have advised on the development of a military hierarchy and command that enables Islamic State to function as a highly disciplined army, rather than as a terror group," writes Atwan.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri went into hiding and evaded capture after the 2003 invasion, playing an important role in the insurgency and then in ISIS's capture of Mosul and northern Iraq. He is reported to have been killed in April this year.

Atwan pieces together a portrait of the secretive Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi, or “Caliph Ibrahim”, with the help of an unnamed contact who was held with him in the US detention centre Camp Bucca for around two years from 2004. For al-Baghdadi as for many others held there, Camp Bucca became a centre of Islamist radicalisation and links forged between its inmates would be important in the uprisings and violence in the years that followed.

Atwan explores in considerable detail the consolidation, expansion, organisastion and administration of IS and describes daily life within IS,  “the richest terror group in history". Its wealth is derived from oil fields and refineries under its control, looting and trading antiquities. Ransoms from kidnappings. were reported to have brought it $20 million in 2014 alone.

In a particularly depressing passage of his book Atwan tells of how IS  considers human trafficking and slavery to be legitimate practice. Atwan notes that the  "Western press has been full of lurid tales of female captives being sold as 'sex slaves'"- but he adds that these stories cannot be dismisssed as sensationalist propaganda.

'the management of savagery' 

The title of the chapter “The Management of Savagery” is taken from that of a 2004 internet document by al-Qa’ida ideologue Abu Bakr Naji. Naji’s document draws heavily on the work of the 14th century Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyyah, “who is considered the first Salafi-jihadist and is revered by today’s hardliners.”

Atwan claims that while IS’s record of atrocities, carefully packaged and distributed by its media department, may seem like an undisciplined orgy of sadism “it is far from being that”. It is “systematically applied policy.” IS comes across as a ghastly hybrid of Saddam's mass sadism and the worst type of of Islamist violence. Atwan examines in detail Naji’s document, which is often referred to by IS’s online speakers and writers.

Atwan references Donald G Dutton's book The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres and Extreme Violence: Why Normal People Come to Commit Atrocities.  Atwan claims that “Americans scarcely blinked when stories of the most barbaric CIA torture practices in Guantamano Bay were revealed” and that civiilised societies "blithely accept atrocity when it is under the banner of a shared cause". Such claims overlook the complexity of contemporary societies, and widely ranging attitudes on human rights.

Atwan includes a chapter on “Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and Islamic State.” He refers to an 8 August 2014 article by David Gardner in the Financial Times attacking Saudi Arabia, and  blaming the advent of IS on the house of Saud, its wholesale export of Wahhabism and jihadist fighters and its funding of extremist groups.

Gardner argued that Saudi Arabia had lost its claim to lead the Sunni world and described the modern jihadist as “a Wahhabi on steroids.” Atwan regards this as a simplified picture, but says: “The Saudi regime, rightly, feels that the declaration of the caliphate, and the overt criticism levelled at the House of Saud by the extremists, constitute a very real threat to its existence. That the challenge is mounted within the unique framework of the House of Saud’s own construct – Wahhabism – makes it all the more potent.” 

In the conclusion to his book Atwan warns that IS is not going away, at least in the short term, and that it has put down roots that will not easily be torn up. "The jihadists have been honing their strategy and battle techniques for more than three decades; unsurprisingly, this latest extremist entity is more powerful, more effective, more ruthless and more worrying than anything that has gone before."

He says there is a chance for a way forward, which is to talk to and negotiate with IS. He draws parallels with the British government's negotiations with the IRA after a century of bloodshed and terrorism and the US sitting down with the Vietnamese in Paris in 1973 after nearly 20 years of slaughter. But he offers no suggestions whatsoever as to what could possibly be negotiated with IS.

Atwan ends by writing that while it is rare for him to agree with an American hawk, he fears that former CIA director Leon Panetta was correct when he told the newspaper USA Today in October 2014: "I think we're looking at a kind of 30-year-war, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere."

press release from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP):

CONTEMPORARY ARAB LITERATURE: HIGHLIGHTS AT SHUBBAK FESTIVAL

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) is proud to be a sponsor of this year’s Shubbak Festival - a window on contemporary Arab culture - taking place in London on 11 -26 July.

The literary portion of Shubbak will include author talks and discussions with four of BQFP’s published authors, covering a range of relevant topics in the world of Arab literature – from the rise of Arabic literature in English to the conceptualizing of a futuristic Middle East through science fiction. The authors and their most recent works are:


A Suspended Life by Atef Abu Saif
To be published by BQFP in July 2016
Event: Hot Off the Press
Venue: The British Library, Saturday 25 July 4:30pm

Written originally in Arabic, A Suspended Life was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction   (IPAF 2915).
Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, the eldest of 14 children. He still lives in Gaza, where he teaches Political Science at the University of Al-Azhar. His writing has been published in the New York Times and the Guardian.



Men Don’t Cry by Faïza Guène
To be published by BQFP in August 2016
Event: Arabic Europe
Venue: The British Library, Sunday 26 July 12:30pm

Faïza Guène is a French writer and director. Born in Bobigny, France in 1985 to parents of Algerian origin she is best known for her two novels, Kiffe kiffe demain and Du rêve pour les oufs. She has also directed several short films, including Rien que des mots (2004).

Men Don't Cry is translated by Sarah Ardizzone from the French original, Un homme, ça ne pleure pas. The novel's central character Mourad was born in Nice to Algerian parents, and would like to forge his own destiny. His biggest nightmare: to become an obese old man with greying hair, nurtured only by his mother’s deep-fried cooking. To prevent this, he will have to reject his heavy family history. But is it really through cutting off that we can fully become ourselves?




Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
Event: The Rise of Arabic Literature in English?
Venue: The British Library, Saturday 25 July 11am
Published by BQFP in 2012

The writing is both literary and accessible, fast-paced, passionate, exuberant and heart-lurching. We'll be hearing much more from Selma Dabbagh’ - Guardian

Out of It follows two Gazans, Rashid and Iman, as they try to forge places for themselves in the midst of occupation, religious fundamentalism and the divisions between Palestinian factions. Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer based in London. Her short stories have been nominated for the International PEN David TK Wong Award and the Pushcart Prize.


Utopia by Dr Ahmed Khaled Towfik
Event: Science Fiction in the Arab World
Venue: The British Library, Saturday 25 July 12.30pm

Published by BQFP in 2011 ‘Towfik paints a vivid picture of Egypt in 2023... a disturbing dystopic vision.’ – Guardian

Ahmed Khaled Towfik was born in 1962 and is the Arab world's most prominent bestselling author of fantasy and horror genres. A medical professor at Egypt's Tanta University, he has written over 200 books.

A futuristic account of Egyptian society in the year 2023, Utopia takes readers on a chilling journey, beyond the gated communities of the North Coast where the wealthy are insulated from the bleakness of life outside the walls. When a young man and a girl break out from this bubble of affluence, they are confronted by a world that they had not imagined possible.

English PEN's translation scheme widens support for independent publishers 


The Book Of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction  - edited by Raphael Cormack and Max Shmookler and published by Manchester-based UK publisher Comma Press - is among the 13 new titles to receive a grant under English PEN's scheme PEN Translates.This collection of short writing from Sudan is the sole work translated from Arabic to receive a PEN Translates grant in the latest batch of awards, announced by English PEN today.

Winners of PEN Translates awards are chosen on the basis of their outstanding literary merit, and their contribution to the UK's literary diversity and publishing strategy. The 13-book list of recipients announced today is very varied: it includes a Tamil poetry anthology, novels from Uruguay and the Democratic Republic of Congo, a children's fantasy novel from Denmark and a work of journalism from China.

PEN Translates is part of English PEN's Writers in Translation programme, which has been promoting literature in translation since 2005 - and thus celebrates its 10th anniversary this year - and is supported by Bloomberg. 2015.  The PEN Translates scheme awards grants to UK publishers for translation costs, and is supported by Arts Council England. The English PEN World Bookshelf features more than 100 books that have received support from the Writers in Translation programme.

The Book of Khartoum includes contributions and translations from Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Max Shmookler, Adam Talib, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Mohammed Ghaylani, Andrew Leber, Elisabeth Jaquette, Sarah Irving, Thoraya El-Rayyes, and Raphael Cormack. It is due to be published by Comma Press in 2016.

The PEN Translates award is a further success for Comma Press, which has received PEN Translates and PEN Promotes awards for a number of previous titles including Iraqi writer Hassan Blaim's short story collection The Iraqi Christ, translated by Jonathan Wright, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) in 2014.  The Well of Trapped Words collection of short stories by Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz, which received a PEN Translates award, was published by Comma Press in May in translation from Turkish by Maureen Freely.

Raphael Cormack is doing a PhD at Edinburgh University, on 19th and 20th cenury Egyptian literature.  Max Shmookler is a PhD student in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia, where his work focuses on 20th century Sudanese literary history. He is the managing editor of Baraza - a meeting space for critical collaboration run by MESAAS graduate students. He wrote about The Book of Khartoum last October in a blogpost entitled Translating an Aesthetic: Reflections on Sudanese Literature in English.

As well as disclosing the 13 latest recipients of PEN Translates awards today, English PEN announced  increased opportunities for publishers seeking funding. UK publishers with turnover of less than £500,000 per annum will be eligible to apply for 100% of the translation costs of a book acquired from another language. Previously, only publishers with a turnover of less than £100,000 per annum were able to apply for this highest level of grant. All other publishers were eligible for a maximum of 75% of a book’s translation costs.

Erica Jarnes, manager of the Writers in Translation programme, said: "We are delighted to be able to offer 100% grants to more publishers. The adjustment to the threshold means that more funding can go towards books (and translators) published by the small, independent, dynamic publishers who have been at the forefront of a vibrant new culture for translated literature in the UK."

Emma House, Director of Publisher Relations at The Publishers Association and a member of the English PEN Writers in Translation Committee said: "The work of English PEN is incredibly important to publishers and we are delighted that the threshold for 100% translations grants is being increased, so that many more publishers will be able to benefit from full grants".

Samantha Schnee, chair of the Writers in Translation committee, commented: "The increase in publisher turnover threshold is exciting news for many creative publishers who are working hard to bring as much literature from abroad into English as possible. It will mean their translation costs could be fully covered, potentially allowing them to take on more titles.

In addition to The Book of Khartoum the other 12  winners of a 2015 PEN Translates award are:

• Paper Tiger by Xu Zhiyuan, translated from Mandarin by Michelle Deeter and Nicky Harman. Published by Head of Zeus, August 2015

• Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poets from Sri Lanka's War by Aazhiyaal, Theva Abira, P Ahilan, Anaar, K P Aravindan, Avvai, Cheran, Dushyanthan, Faheema Jahan, Kutti Revathi, Malathi Maithri, Nuhman, Ravikumar, A Sankari, M Rishan Shareef, Sivaramani, S Sivasegaram, Solaikilli, Sukirtharani, Sharmila Syyed, Thirumaavalavan, Urvashi, Captain Vaanathi, S Vilvaratnam, S Vivaratnam, Yesurasa, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, Sascha Ebeling. Published by Arc Publications, October 2015

• Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated from French by Roland Glasser. Published by Jacaranda Books, October 2015

• All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, translated from German by Anthea Bell. Published by Granta Books, November 2015

• Diary of a Body by Daniel Pennac, translated from French by Alyson Waters. Published by Maclehose Press, November 2015

• On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. Published by Harvill Secker, February 2016

• The Transmigration of the Bodies by Yuri Herrera, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Published by And Other Stories, March 2016

• I'll Sell You a Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey. Published by And Other Stories, June 2016

• Nouons-nous by Emmanuelle Pagano, translated from French by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins. Published by And Other Stories, July 2016

• In the Rock by Clemens Meyer, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, October 2016

• Erik's Journey to Valhalla by Lars-Henrik Olsen, translated from Danish by Paul Russell Garrett. Published by Aurora Metro Books, May 2017

• The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, translated from Spanish by Ana Fletcher. Published by And Other Stories, publication date tbc

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), has been awarded the Chatham House Prize 2015, the London-based Chatham House think tank (which incorporates the Royal Institute of International Affairs) announced today. The Chatham House Prize - launched in 2005 - is presented annually to the person or organization deemed by members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.

The selection process draws on the expertise of Chatham House's research teams and three presidents, who nominate candidates. Its members are then invited to vote for the winner in a ballot.

This year, members voted for MSF in recognition of its work in combating the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. MSF was among the first groups to respond to the epidemic in March of that year and remained engaged on the ground throughout the crisis, caring for the majority of patients in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. MSF leaders and staff were persistent and forceful in their action to halt the spread of the epidemic and, as a result, were instrumental in saving thousands of lives.

The  three other nominees for the Chatham House Prize 2015 were:
 • Mahamadou Issoufou, President, Republic of Niger (2011-)
 • Juan Manuel Santos, President, Republic of Colombia (2010-)
 • Angela Merkel, Chancellor, Federal Republic of Germany (2005-)

Dr Joanne Liu, MSF’s international president, will represent MSF at the Chatham House Prize award ceremony in London in October 2015 where she will be presented with a crystal award and a scroll, signed by Her Majesty The Queen, Patron of the institute. Previous recipients of the Prize include President Lula of Brazil, Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG, director of Chatham House, said: “I warmly congratulate Médecins Sans Frontières on being voted the recipient of this year's Chatham House Prize. This is the first time an organization has been awarded the Prize and I am delighted that their vital work has been recognized in this way. MSF led the fight against Ebola by sounding an early alarm on its dangers. It put into place a highly effective operation that saved thousands of lives, and helped prevent a more wide-spread catastrophe, risking and, in some cases losing the lives of its own staff.”

Dr Joanne Liu, international president of MSF said:
"I am honoured that MSF will be the recipient of this year’s Chatham House Prize and I look forward to accepting this award on behalf of the thousands of people who worked in the Ebola outbreak. This includes the doctors, nurses and logisticians who volunteered from around the world, and the thousands more national staff in Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, who made our work possible. Knowing that they did this while coping with the fear of Ebola in their communities and in the face of incredible stigma, makes their contribution even more remarkable. While we continue to work on the ground, our focus is also trying to ensure that next time there is an outbreak, that patients get the care and treatment they need, on time, before it spreads and turns into a killer epidemic. But we all still have a long way to go and it is important that we work together to respond to these challenges and opportunities.