interview with May Hawas editor of The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties

February 8, 2018, 10:58 am

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May Hawas

Susannah Tarbush interviews Egyptian scholar and writer May Hawas, editor of The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties published by American University in Cairo (AUC) Press in two volumes, covering 1964-66 (published in 2016) and 1966-68 (2017).

What made you so keen to see Waguih Ghali’s diaries published, and to take on the project of transcribing and editing them?
Waguih Ghali is something of a cult hero for Egyptians in their twenties and thirties (or who are in their twenties and thirties at heart), and an important forefigure for the Anglo-Arab novel. We felt it was important that we salvage his diaries for the public. I’ve described elsewhere how – tentatively – the diaries made it into print: (see The AUC Press Newsletter )

The handwriting in the diaries lodged in the Waguih Ghali archive at Cornell University is hard to decipher (at least I find it so!) Did you do all the transcription yourself, or was there a team of some kind, and roughly what proportion of the original handwritten diaries appear in the final published version?
I did the transcription myself, about 85 percent of which is now in the published version. How, practically? With a photocopy of the material, a computer, and more periods of sitting down than I would like to remember.

The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties 1964-66

In the West there is a growing appetite for knowing the intimate details of a writer’s life, in terms of diaries, memoirs, letters and so on. Is this also the case in Egypt and other Arab countries?
Is it a growing appetite? Everywhere, any time there are famous writers, there will be fans, editors, scholars, translators, and flies on the wall.

The diaries are remarkably frank, particularly when it comes to Ghali’s sex life. Did you sometimes hesitate over including certain passages, or names, in the published version?
I hesitated over every paragraph but not for particularly moral reasons. We were very lucky with Ghali. He makes it clear in his diary that he wants it to be published. He writes this repeatedly and wills it in his suicide note. We’re lucky, too, that he’s an unreliable narrator. Much of what he says, if we’re fussed about historical veracity, can be taken with a pinch of salt. I explain this in my introduction to the Diaries.

'I'm an editor, not the inquisition'

So I’m an editor, not the inquisition. I didn’t hesitate over what to include as much as I hesitated over what to exclude. It’s a long text, non-fictional, sometimes repetitive, and at times, incredibly depressing. Then again, that’s what posthumous diaries are like. Changing them would have really meant I was rewriting the material into another genre. I didn’t think I had the authority for that. That worried me. How he chose to spend his time, didn’t.

How have readers and critics reacted to the published diaries, and what did they find most surprising in them?
The Diaries have met with great success. Readers are touchingly empathetic to Ghali’s psychological struggles, curious about his sexual exploits, and drawn to the historical events that he mentions in passing. We’ve received plaudits from old fans and new fans, novelists and scholars, but also filmmakers and translators keen to work on the Diaries.

Have launch and other events for the diaries been held/planned?
We’ve had two events so far: one held at Oriental Hall, in the American University in Cairo in September 2017, through the kind invitation of the Centre for Translation Studies, and we were graciously invited to hold another event at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo in October 2017. And, not to put too fine a point on it, we are open to other invitations.

Are there plans for a translation of the diaries into Arabic? And perhaps German (especially the first volume) and other languages.
Let me leave the cat firmly in the bag on that one.

How far does the Waguih of The Diaries resemble the Ram of Beer in the Snooker Club?
Tricky question. How far does any author resemble his or her creation?

I find that among young Arab writers in Britain, there is quite an interest in Waguih Ghali – as if a new generation is discovering him. Do you find the same in Egypt, and maybe elsewhere, and does his single published novel Beer in the Snooker Club have a renewed relevance today?
Beer in the Snooker Club was previously famous primarily in departments of English and in small circles of Anglophone readers in Egypt. The novel’s reprint in the 1980s gave it new life alongside the growing interest in world literature in English, particularly from the Middle East. You are right of course about the interest by Arab writers connected to Britain. If Ahdaf Soueif was one of the earliest and most famous to champion the novel in the 1980s in the London Review of Books, Saleem Haddad was one of the first to review the Diaries last year (see review of Volume 1 in full-stop.net ).

In Egypt, in the 1990s, the novel found resonance with a younger generation of English-speaking Egyptians restless with the political status quo and more open to the lifestyle portrayed in the novel. Its translation into Arabic in the early 2000s gave it a whole new dimension of fame. There is much that resonates for Egyptians, but mostly – I think! – is its mixture of the political and non-political. Then, there’s the popularity of Ram himself. A charmer, a boozer, and a ladies’ man who reads and is viciously critical of the world, who walks the familiar streets of Cairo and narrates the familiar private homes of Egyptians.

'the personification of cool'

There’s also something particularly youthful about it. It’s a young person’s novel, mixing risible superficiality with deep moral outrage. Much has been made about how Ram belongs to nowhere – actually, Ram seems to be one of those rare people who has created for himself a system of values in which he is supremely comfortable. It’s everyone outside the system – the mainstream, the government, the public – that doesn’t belong. So in his self-sufficiency and romantic alienation, Ram is the personification of cool.

The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties 1966-68

As a Londoner, for me one of the pleasures of reading the diaries has been the connections it has with events, places, people in Britain. Have you received feedback in the diaries from anyone in the UK?
I share your pleasure in this. The Diaries, much like the novel, are a love story to London. Ghali calls it the place in which he feels most at home. This is the reason for the ‘swinging sixties’ in the title: except it’s an impoverished-upper-crust-Egyptian look at the swinging sixties.

I’ve heard from people around the world, actually, from the US, France, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Mexico, but also from the UK, especially from children of Ghali’s friends curious to see how their parents figure in the Diaries. Of course, knowing Ghali’s writing, the characterisation usually includes sex, alcohol, politics, books, some slagging off, and a lot of exaggeration.

Do you think the diaries would be of interest to psychologists, analysts and therapists – especially those with an interest in the relationship between creativity and mental distress?
Absolutely. The Diaries give an incredibly honest description of the feelings of both depression and euphoria, as well as of alcoholism, and the effects of all this on creativity. Some of the reader reviews have picked up on it already.

How did Waguih Ghali’s family and friends react to the publication of the diaries? The interview with his cousin Samir Basta in the second volume is a most valuable addition.

Thank you, yes, Samir was wonderfully supportive, as have been all of Ghali’s family and friends whom we talked to and who reached out to us.

The Waguih Ghali papers in Cornell University Library include two fragments of Ghali’s unfinished second novel Ashl and 51 letters, mostly from Ghali to his literary editor Diana Athill. Are there plans to transcribe and publish these?
You know, I sometimes think the definition of Tragedy should be “an unfinished novel”. One of the greatest storytellers of all time, Charles Dickens, has an unfinished novel. Who reads it? So I’ll take a leaf out of that example and stay away from the Ashl novel for now, and the same goes for his letters to Diana. If in the future a publisher thinks it would be a good idea to issue a complete volume of Waguih Ghali’s non-fictional writing, including his diaries, letters, articles and the Ashl novel, then I may be the first in line to take up transcribing again.

May Hawas is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC). She received her PhD in Literature from Leuven University. In addition to editing The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties, May has published a number of articles, book chapters, and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, the Journal of World Literature, and Comparative Literature Studies, while her stories have been published in Mizna: Journal of Arab American Art; Yellow Medicine Review, and African Writing. She is editor of The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, due to be published in April.

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50 years on from Waguih Ghali's suicide his taboo-busting diaries make debut in print

February 8, 2018, 1:42 pm

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The diaries of Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali are published  half a century after his suicide 

by

Susannah Tarbush, London

[an Arabic translation of this article was published in Al-Hayat newspaper on 8 February 2018] 

Fifty years after the suicide of the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali in London, the first-ever publication of his diaries is helping to boost the revival of interest in the writer and his ground-breaking novel Beer in the Snooker Club.

The diaries are published in two volumes by the American University in Cairo Press under the title The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties. They are edited by Egyptian scholar and writer May Hawas, assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

The diaries are astonishingly frank, chronicling in explicit detail Ghali’s manic depression, his chaotic love life and many sexual adventures, his drinking and gambling, his interactions with a huge number of friends and acquaintances, the pain of exile, memories of Alexandria where he was born, and his pride in being Egyptian and a Copt.  His gifts as a novelist are evident in the way he writes scenes and character sketches, with a sharp ear for dialogue and frequent humorous touches.

“The diaries have met with great success,” Hawas told Al-Hayat. “Readers are touchingly empathetic to Ghali’s psychological struggles, curious about his sexual exploits, and drawn to the historical events that he mentions in passing. We’ve received plaudits from old fans and new fans, novelists and scholars, but also filmmakers and translators keen to work on the diaries.”

May Hawas

In her illuminating introduction to the published diaries Hawas says they mark a watershed “in the genre of the Arab (or Anglo-Arab) memoir in their openness about the taboos of family conflict, psychological trauma, alcoholic dependency and sexual dissipation.”

Asked whether she hesitated over including certain sensitive material in the edited diaries, Hawas replies: “I hesitated over every paragraph but not for particularly moral reasons. We were very lucky with Ghali. He makes it clear in his diary that he wants it to be published. He writes this repeatedly and wills it in his suicide note. We’re lucky, too, that he’s an unreliable narrator.”

She adds: “So I’m an editor, not the inquisition. I didn’t hesitate over what to include as much as I hesitated over what to exclude. It’s a long text, non-fictional, sometimes repetitive, and at times, incredibly depressing. Then again, that’s what posthumous diaries are like. Changing them would have really meant I was rewriting the material into another genre. I didn’t think I had the authority for that. That worried me. How he chose to spend his time, didn’t.”

Writing his diary was important for Ghali and he seems to have used it as a form of therapy. In his first-ever entry, on 24 May 1964, he wrote: “Going mad, as I seem to be going, perhaps it’d be better to keep my Diary […] if only for a streak of sanity.”

The entries in the first volume of the published diaries were written while Ghali was living in the town of  Rheydt, in West Germany when he was working in the offices of the British Army of the Rhine. He had become a political exile in around 1954; before moving to Germany in 1960  he had lived first in Paris as a medical student in 1953-54 and then in London – where he attended Chelsea Polytechnic – in 1955-58 - before moving to Sweden.

Ghali’s debut novel Beer in the Snooker Club had been published by London publisher AndréDeutsch,in 1964, and then in the US by Knopf. It had received generally excellent reviews in leading publications. But Ghali struggled to write his second novel, entitled Ashl.  While in Germany he wrote some pieces for the Guardian newspaper, and a play. But writing in his diaries was his main literary outlet. He often wrote in his diaries about the many books he read, and his feelings of inferiority in comparison to writers he admired.

One of the main characters in Beer in the Snooker Club is a Jewish woman named Edna, lover of the novel’s narrator Ram. While living in Germany Ghali was reminded of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, and deplored the racism he encountered.

During the time he lived in London his circle of friends included a number of Jews and Israelis. The climax of the diaries is the controversial visit he made as a journalist to Israel and occupied east Jerusalem and West Bank from July to September 1967, after the June war. He was commissioned to write articles for the Observer and Times newspapers. He claimed to have been the first Egyptian to visit Israel for fifteen years or so.  In May 1968 an Egyptian official in London declared publicly that Ghali was not an Egyptian but a defector to Israel, which hurt him deeply.

Ghali’s diaries show that during his visit to Israel he met a wide spectrum of people, including Israeli officials, Israelis of different political hues, and Palestinians. He became increasingly disillusioned by Israel. He wrote in Jerusalem on 7 August 1967: “… I am angry and feel that the Jordanian and Arab Palestinians are just being pushed about; and the whole Israeli propaganda stinks with hypocrisy and lies. I prefer to wear an Arab headdress and walk about in the old town alone, and not have one of the conquerors with me.”

In the essay “An Egyptian in Israel” written for the BBC, and republished in the 1968 book Good Talk: An Anthology from BBC Radio, he wrote: “As a result of this visit, my attitude towards Israel changed dramatically. I am still very much in favour of an understanding between the Arabs and Israel. But whereas my pleas for understanding were previously directed towards the Arabs, I now feel that Israel is very much more to blame than the Arabs for the state of belligerency that exists in the Middle East.”

After his visit to Israel Ghali writes in his diaries of getting to know and socialise with a group of left-wing dissident Israelis in London including Akiva Orr, “a most lovable Communist Israeli”. The group included the journalist, artist and writer Shimon Tzabar, who with help from Ghali and others launched a satirical magazine called “Israel Imperial News”. In its first issue, which can be read online, there are articles by Waguih Ghali and the Iraqi writer and journalist Khalid Kishtainy. 

But Ghali’s wide network of friends and contacts, and a new love relationship with a medical student, could not save him from his whirlpool of depression. On 26 December 1968 he swallowed a massive overdose of sleeping pills intending to kill himself. He was at the time alone in the London flat of his literary editor, friend, mentor and – briefly -  lover Diana Athill. He had been living in her flat since moving to London from Germany in May 1966.

“I’m going to kill myself tonight,” Ghali wrote in the final entry in his diary.  “The time has come. I am, of course, drunk. But then sober it would have been very very very difficult.”

We know from the book Athill wrote about Ghali, After a Funeral, published in 1986, that after swallowing the sleeping pills Ghali telephoned a friend and was rushed to hospital by ambulance. Friends were at his bedside as doctors tried to save his life, but he died on 5 January 1969. He was only in his late thirties (his year of birth is not known, but according to May Hawas it is thought to be 1929 or 1930).

In the final diary entry, Ghali made it clear that he wanted his diaries published. He wrote: “Diana sweetheart… I am leaving you my Diary, luv – well edited, it would be a good piece of literature.”

Half a century later, May Hawas certainly has edited the diaries very well. The handwriten diaries were in the form of six notebooks covering around 700 pages. A photocopy has been digitised for the Cornell University archive of “Waguih Ghali Unpublished Papers”. The sprawling handwriting gives the impression of speed spontaneity, and is difficult to read. Hawas deciphered it and typed it up: she says she kept around 85 percent of the original handwritten diaries in the published version.

Asked why she was so keen to see the diaries published, and why she took on the project of editing them, Hawas says: “Waguih Ghali is something of a cult hero for Egyptians in their twenties and thirties (or who are in their twenties and thirties at heart), and an important forefigure for the Anglo-Arab novel. We felt it was important that we salvage his diaries for the public.”

She has added valuable material, in the form of her highly informative introduction and two interviews conducted by Deborah Starr of Cornell University. The first interview is with Diana Athill. The second is with Samir Sanad Basta, the son of Ghali’s mother’s sister Ketty.

How did Ghali’s family and friends react to the project of publishing his diaries?  Hawas says “Samir was wonderfully supportive, as have been all of Ghali’s family and friends whom we talked to and who reached out to us.”

 The 12-page interview with Samir Basta contains many insights into Ghali’s personal history and his character. Some of Ghali’s psychological distress may be attributable to his mother’s rejection of him after his physician father died when he was young and she remarried. It was Samir’s mother Ketty who brought him up. It could be that Ghali was always seeking a maternal love from other women, only to reject them once they had succumbed to him.

EXCERPTS from “The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties” , volumes 1 (1964-66) and 2 (1966-68)

Thursday 11^thMarch 1965 [Rheydt, West Germany]

I hate the Germans. There is no getting away from it. Vulgar, loud, greedy. Nothing fine, delicate or sensitive in them. Enfin.  But at the same time, I have never, in my life, met such kindness and hospitality as I have here. This is, to me, a very difficult business altogether. I have been given asylum here, helped, fed, saved, and yet … yet. But it is ungratefulness to dislike them and hate them. I wish I could just hate the hateful, and love the lovable … but one can’t, one has to reach a conclusion about the whole country […].

Wednesday 16^thSeptember 1965 [Rheydt]

Yesterday evening, lying in bed, I read some Chekhov again. “An Anonymous Story.” I even handle his books with reverence and love. He is the greatest of all men, is Chekhov. I have never heard any of his contemporaries say anything bad about him. But what is most remarkable is that Chekhov makes life worth living … I dote on him so much that if I say “Why was I ever born?” I could answer, but to read Chekov …

I wrote a bit for my ‘novel’ yesterday, but after reading Chekhov, I knew what horrible trash it is …

Saturday 16th October 1965 [Rheydt]
Woke up at 4 a.m. –feeling suicidal, smoked two cigarettes, tried to sleep again –nothing but nightmares and tossing […] I am feeling absolutely empty and dead inside. I shall never be a happy man-

Tuesday, 6^thJune 1967  [London]

Tragedies – catastrophes. Native, international and personal. There has been war between the Arabs and Israel for forty-eight hours. The Egyptian army, which has been built at unbearable expense for ten years, has been wiped out in twenty-four hours of fighting. It is really pathetic. To save his face, Nasser says there was Anglo-American support of Israel. This is not true. He has led us and all the Arabs into a moral and physical disaster – .

31^stJanuary 1968  [London]

For two weeks at the beginning of the month, I had been having a simultaneous active affair with Carmen, Susan and Ruth. Carmen would come here at lunchtime, then I would make love to Susan in the evening. Ruth would invite me for supper and next morning I would wake up straight for a date with Carmen. One by one they expressed terms of love, and each one in turn I gently, unabusively, unconsciously as far as they are concerned, I have discarded.

26^thMay 1968 [London]

Akiva Orr, Bill Hillier and myself were to give a talk about Israel and Palestine at the LSE or rather the School for Oriental and Islamic Culture. The hall was packed – with Israelis, some Arabs and the rest English. Just as they closed the door and the chairman rose to introduce us, a chap from the back rose and said: “Excuse me please. Before you start I would like to mention one important thing: on your posters you advertise Waguih Ghali as an Egyptian. I am a representative of the Egyptian government. Mr Ghali is not Egyptian. He has defected to Israel.”

I was completely and utterly furious – and yet the next few minutes were the only ones in which I was eloquent. I wiped the floor with the chap… I was loudly applauded and the chap left. But afterwards … while Aki spoke (he was giving the main talk) I sat in my chair … drowned in an incomprehensible sorrow. It suddenly, after all those years, dawned up  on me that not only had I had no ‘home’ since the ages of ten or so, but that I now also had no country.

Extracts published by kind permission of The American University in Cairo Press.

Writers' voices from the "banned" Muslim nations cross the Atlantic in Banthology

March 13, 2018, 11:54 am

≫ Next: Q&A with Rana Haddad author of 'The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor'

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In January the UK publisher Comma Press published a unique and timely anthology of new short stories, by writers from the seven Muslim-majority countries named in US President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations appeared on the first anniversary of Trump’s 27 January 2017 signing of Executive Order 13769 which imposed the US's first-ever Muslim ban. The Executive Order banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the USA for 90 Days. It also halted refugee settlement for 120 days and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely. 

Banthology is edited by Sarah Cleave, who writes in her introduction: “The idea for this book was born amid the chaos of that first ban, and sought to champion, give voice to, and better understand a set of nations that the White House would like us to believe are populated entirely by terrorists.” 

She adds: “As publishers, we are acutely aware of the importance of cultural exchange between communities, and have also seen first-hand the damage caused by tightened visa controls and existing travel restrictions, not just on artists but on their families – that is to say the damage that impacts on all citizens of nations targeted by prejudicial border controls.”

On 27 March Deep Vellum Publishing of Dallas, Texas, in association with Comma, is due to publish the US edition of the book under the title of Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations.

Since the ban was first issued, it has faced a series of legal challenges and has undergone various reformulations. Will Evans, director and publisher of Deep Vellum, says: “The collection was created in response to Trump’s hateful original order, and remains especially urgent in the wake of recent events resulting in the reinstatement of the ban, and as the world awaits the Supreme Court’s final ruling on its legality.”

Evans says literature offers a means “to bring cultures into conversation, to share stories, build connections grow empathy. The stories in Banthology reflect the shared experience of the human condition that unites us all, and no hateful political ban will ever be stronger than the bonds of our shared humanity.”

the US edition - Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations.

The two men and five women contributors to Banthology are Najwa Binshatwan from Libya, Rania Mamoun (Sudan), Zaher Omareen (Syria), Fereshteh Molavi (Iran), Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Somalia), Anoud (Iraq) and Wajdi al-Ahdal (Yemen). Two of the stories were written in English, while four were translated from Arabic and one from Italian.

Comma Press is, like Deep Vellum, a not-for-profit publisher. It is supported by the Arts Council England, and focuses on promoting new writing, particularly short stories. It takes a keen interest in translating and publishing literature by Arab authors, and prior to Banthology had published seven books of stories translated from Arabic including, in 2016, The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction edited by Ralph Cormack and Max Shmookler and Iraq +100: stories from a century after the invasion edited by Hassan Blasim. 

After Trump signed the Muslim ban, Comma declared it would stand in solidarity with those of its writers affected by the ban, including all 20 contributors to The Book of Khartoum and Iraq +100.

The contributors to Banthology were asked to develop "a fictional response to Trump’s discriminatory ban, exploring themes of exile, travel and restrictions on movement.” The publisher wanted “to showcase as many different experiences as possible, as the travel ban not only affects those living inside the so-called ‘banned nations’, but also those that have sought peace and freedom in exile.”

The writers approached the themes in diverse ways, often entering the realm of speculative fiction. Their accomplished and disturbing stories tell of attempts to transcend borders and barriers of various kinds. The elliptical narratives are frequently laced with irony, playfulness and a sense of the absurd. Though the authors’ protagonists show resilience, they are prone to a sense of loneliness and to psychological distress that on occasion tips over into breakdown.

Wajdi al-Ahdal 

The stories range freely over place and time. “The Slow Man” by Yemeni novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and dramatist Wajdi al-Ahdal, translated by William M Hutchins, transports the reader back to the year 100 according to the Babylonian calendar. Al-Ahdal explores what might have happened had the prophet Yusuf of the Quran, Joseph of the Bible, been barred from crossing the border into Egypt with the caravan that rescued him as a boy after his brothers tried to kill him and then abandoned him in the desert.

The Commander of the northern frontier of Egypt and Gaza – the “Slow Man” of the story’s title – has imposed a ban preventing the Babylonians and those they rule from entering Egypt. “He justified his ban as a temporary measure, designed to keep Egypt and its territories safe from the infiltration of enemies.” The High Priest persuades the Commander to waive the ban for the Israelite caravan carrying the boy Yusuf, and the Commander agrees, but after the Priest falls victim to an assassination plot the conspirators order the caravan to turn back.

Al-Ahdal sketches the disasters that befall Egypt and reshape world history, geography and spirituality in the absence of Yusuf over a series of time slots starting with the year 128 in the Babylonian era when more than 80 per cent of the Egyptian population dies in a famine, that Yusuf would have helped avert, and Babylon takes over the country and erases Egypt from the map by diverting the Nile to flow south into Lake Chad. In the Babylonian year 4000 previously unknown creatures slip through the cracked “space-time cone of four-dimensional existence”, claiming to be the planet’s primordial species returned to recolonise earth as “They Who Have Come to Retrieve the Earth from Mankind.”

Najwa Binshatwan

In Libyan author Najwa Binshatwan's adventurous story "Return Ticket", translated by Sawad Hussain, a woman tells her grandson about the only time she left her home village of Schrödinger. She was pregnant at the time with her grandson’s father, and travelled to meet her husband who had left the village for work. At every stage of her journey she encountered hostile airport officials. They imposed strict and baffling rules, forcing her to forfeit inter alia her headscarf and underwear. When she arrived at her destination her husband was so enraged by her partially unclad state that he divorced her on the spot. She was stranded in the airport for years, "selling tissues to travellers until I could buy a return ticket to Schrödinger".

The village’s name alludes to the Nobel Prizewinning quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. It is “an open-minded village, where people, animals, plants, diseases and every type of wind pass through with great ease.” And it is a cosmic anomaly: "The name granted the village extraordinary powers; it could move through time and space, changing its orbit spontaneously as if it were the sun rising in one place and setting in another.”

'the Statue of Liberty and her bird-shit-splattered crown'

The only humans to visit Schrödinger were six American tourists, who got stuck there because the walls of their nation rose day by day until it was cut off from the world. Each attempt by an American tourist to scale the towering walls and return home was fatal. The walls were built higher and higher “until all that could be seen was the snuffed-out torch of the Statue of Liberty and her bird-shit-splattered crown.” From time to time the dead tourists speak from their graves in Schrödinger, and the eldest one comments: “It’s good that we died before America’s prison warder came to power.”

Rania Mamoun

In Sudanese author, journalist and activist Rania Mahmoud’s lyrical story “The Bird of Paradise”, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, the protagonist has longed to travel “ever since I realised that the world’s limits are not those of my city, Wad Madani; that the world expands so much further than the reach of my imagination”. She is oppressed by her tyrannical brother, who assaults here for daring even to spend the day in a nearby village. “I dreamed of becoming a bird of paradise, resplendent with colourful feathers, a beautiful head, black eyes and powerful wings.”

With the support of her girl cousin Ashwaq, who unlike her had been allowed to study at Khartoum University, she plans her escape. “Everything was arranged. I would have a seven-hour stopover then get on another place to another city, where Ashwaq’s friend would be waiting for me.” And yet when the moment comes to board the plane she finds herself nailed to the spot and unable to move forward in the queue. Like the protagonist of Binshatwan’s story she is marooned in an airport, stuck in limbo.

An earlier story by Mamoun, “Passing”, appeared in Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction. Comma is scheduled to publish her story collection Thirteen Months of Sunrise this year.

A story by the Iraqi woman writer Anoud, entitled “Kahramana”, was published in Iraq +100. “Storyteller”, her story for Banthology, depicts an Iraqi woman driven to the edge by the serial traumas of Iraq and then of living in the UK as an asylum seeker.

While eating in an Indian takeaway in East London, Jamela recites her harrowing personal chronology to the staff, starting with her first experience in 1991 of an air raid, and moving on to describing her hunger under economic sanctions in 1996, the 2003 US and UK-led invasion, the torture, rape and killing of a friend, the murder of a cousin, and her own surviving a car bombing. As an asylum seeker in the UK she has drifted into alcoholism, drugs, dodgy sexual encounters and suicide attempts.

Jamela describes seeing a car wrecked by a bombing in Baghdad that she has seen as an exhibit “mounted on a clean white podium under a blinging spotlight at the Imperial War Museum in London … The slabs of dented metal were so mangled they looked like tens of human guts pressed together and left baking in Iraq’s burning sun until they were bone dry.” (Presumably a dig at the uncomfortable concept of the aestheticization of violence). Jamela erupts into uncontrollable fury when the TV in the  takeaway shows Trump’s notorious December 2015 campaign speech: “Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s’ representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Zaher Omareen 

The protagonist of Zaher Omareen’s blackly comic “The Beginner’s Guide to Smuggling”, translated by Perween Richards and Basma Ghalayini, is an illegal migrant from Hama, Syria. A former prisoner in his mid-twenties, he is travelling across Europe to his hoped-for destination, Sweden, “where I will press the RESTART button”. Omareen’s story is well-observed and witty, its narrator given to wry asides such as “When in Rome do as the Romans. When in Greece do as the Syrians do.” He had travelled on a boat with other refugees from Turkey to Kos had capsized. He grumbles to himself about the “XL sized family who got overly excited when they saw the land of dreams getting closer. The boat had tipped over with everyone in it.”

The migrant constantly curses Kalimera, the Kos-based people smuggler from Aleppo, with “ten mobile phones in front of him, all ringing and falling silent in chorus.” Carrying a mobile phone is essential for those making their perilous journeys to Europe. “Oh god of mobile phones, master of the luminous dawn, carrier of fertility to our barren lands, patron saint of the tired and hungry,” the narrator muses.

Kalimera has provided the narrator with a fake passport of the Hungarian ambassador to Turkey’s husband, throwing in a Greek ID as well for free. The narrator manages to pass himself off as Hungarian during his flight from Greece to Paris, and then masquerades as Greek. From Paris he arranges a lift in a car to Denmark from where he will travel to Sweden. To the narrator’s horror he finds the driver of the car has brought along a giant Doberman: the narrator is terrified of dogs. The Doberman’s barks remind him of interrogations by prison guards.

Fereshteh Molavi 

The enigmatic story “Phantom Limb” by Iranian writer Fereshteh Molavi is set among a group of artistically-inclined exiles in Toronto, where Molavi herself lives. The first-person narrator is an Iranian who came to Toronto on a student visa with dreams of becoming a theatre director. He and his three roommates, who are aspiring actors, perform plays at home after dinner. But in the day they have to work at mundane jobs.

The story focuses on the narrator's observations of the elusive Farhad, an Iranian Kurd whose Persian cat stalks from room to room. The narrator is fascinated by two pictures Farhad has hung on the wall: an old map of Iran "covered with intricate painted patterns, much like a Persian cat's coat" and an old black-and-white photo of a woman on horseback, dressed in Kurdish men's clothes and a turban, and carrying a gun.

The roommates speculate on whether the photo is of Farhad’s mother or of the girl he had loved years before. The girl would sing to him from the prison cell next to his before she was executed.

After Farhad learns in a phone call from his father back home that his mother has had to have her right leg amputated he starts to develops pains in his foot and leg and eventually his leg is badly injured in an accident. The story is suggestive of the bonds between those in exile and their homeland and family. Their pain is carried like a phantom limb, and the difficulties in realising one’s dreams in a new environment.

The roommates work for an exiled Iranian entrepreneur of an older generation who had served in the Iranian Air force under the Shah. While he interviews the narrator for a job he tucks into a  gargantuan display of Iranian delicacies lovingly provided by his wife, “As he ate, he spoke endlessly about his journey from lowly immigrant to top-class businessman. His story didn’t interest me. I’d heard it before…”

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Somali writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona, Italy, to an Italian father and Somali mother. Her exquisite story “Jujube” is translated from Italian by Hope Campbell Gustafson. The dreamlike story becomes increasingly chilling as the reliability of the narrator Ayan, who has lived through horrific violence in Somalia, is called into question.

Farah starts her story by evoking the traditional way of life in the village, where Ayan's mother is a healer using medicinal plants. The mother tends the hair of  her two daughters with extracts from the leaves of the Jujube tree. People flee to the village from the city, which "burns and glows like a brazier, a filthy firework under the full moon", before the village itself is attacked.

Ayan becomes separated from her mother and sister and we next find her in freezing Italy where she is nanny to an Italian woman’s young daughter. Ayan has filed a request for family reunification with her mother and sister whom she says are in the US. But her narrative is interspersed periodically with brief notes by an interpreter. The interpreter states that Ayan’s account, while making a request for asylum, is full of omissions and incongruences.

Comma Press should be applauded for commissioning and publishing this powerful collection of original stories, as should Deep Vellum for being Comma’s co-publisher of Banthology in the USA. The stories shine a light on collective experiences through individual stories and might help bring about an understanding that runs counter to the demonisation of a religion and of entire nationalities through a crass, unjust and discriminatory ban.

Susannah Tarbush, London

Q&A with Rana Haddad author of 'The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor'

June 26, 2018, 8:34 am

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Q&A with Syrian-British writer Rana Haddad, whose debut novel The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor was recently published by Hoopoe, an  imprint of the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press

How far is your novel autobiographical, for example in terms of Dunya's mixed Syrian-English parentage?
In a nutshell, I left Syria at 15 and a half. My father is Syrian my mother Dutch and Armenian. I lived mostly in London but also in Paris and Madrid and a short while in Beirut. I am now living between England and Crete. The plot is very much a fiction but the settings and impressions all mine. This is the Syria I lived in as a child and teenager and later visited over the years .

You are a journalist of long standing, working in print and broadcast media. You  have also had a volume of poetry published (The Boy Moon Lost Love Poems Found in an Envelope - 2008). How long have you been writing fiction? 
I tried to write fiction in my twenties but it was impossible for me then, it always turned out too poetic. I needed to learn to become more practical and journalism and especially working in television I think helped me with that, especially  the structure aspect of fiction over such a long canvass.

I had the title, idea and general pot outline for this novel in the early 2000 but from first draft to final draft there were major stops and starts due to a number of reasons including health and moving countries and work. But during that time I also developed quite a lot of the plot and even the text for my second novel and third.

Photography and Dunya’s passion for it is a key dimension of the novel. Did you  have a previous special interest and practice in photography?
 I have never practiced photography myself and whenever I tried I failed because my mind does not work that way - I struggle with the technical element of it. But I had a deep and important friendship with a photographer which made me even more interested in it.

Could you say something about your ongoing work in theatre and drama?
I have been involved in some development work with the RSC on a play written by a long standing friend of mine, but this is still in development. Currently I am developing a small performance with a friend who is a Syrian singer - where we will mix scenes from Dunya with songs which she will sing live. This is how I would like to do my book readings of Dunya.

How did your connection with Crete come about? 
I'm exploring living part-time in Crete, which is the most south Eastern part of Europe and  very near Syria. I can't imagine myself being able to spend all my life entirely in England as I miss Syria too much, and currently I feel Crete is a wonderful compromise and counter-point, and I am learning a lot about Syria's Byzantine and pre Islamic and even pre Christian roots from there. Crete and the Levant have a deep and important link, in myth and culture.

The novel has plenty of poetry in it, including song lyrics …. is this poetry your own, traditional, a mixture of the two?
All the poems and songs in Dunya are written by me, except for "Reader of the Coffee Cup" (of course!) The first song Suha sings which includes the words, Oh Night on Eyes, (Ya leili ya Ein), that expression is of course taken from popular mawals, but the rest is pure fiction.

Are there plans to translate the novel into Arabic and perhaps other languages?
No idea so far, I heard of talks to translate the novel into German and Dutch but so far nothing concrete. I would love it to be translated into Arabic of course, but also Spanish and French as I think it would particularly work in those languages.

Could you say something  about your next novel? Your LinkedIn entry mentions that it will be set in Indonesia in the 30s and 40s, and will also take in the Armenian diaspora and Persia.
My second novel which I am working on now is set in London and itwill continue on from some of the major themes I explored in Dunya, but in a very different setting and the characters will be in their 30s. My third novel will be set in Indonesia, but I have already started research for it, as it will take me years to understand Indonesia enough before I can write anything that makes any sense about it. My maternal grandmother and mother and aunts were born and grew up in Indonesia actually. She was the child of the Armenian diaspora from Isfahan who moved to Java island around 1917, and my grandfather was Dutch who came there after the second world war. I want to take that time period and setting but then improvise, as I like to do, and as I did in Dunya.

review of Rana Haddad's novel 'The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor'

July 12, 2018, 1:52 am

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English version of article published in Arabic in Al-Hayat newspaper on 12 July 2018.

Rana Haddad tells a Syrian love story in English

The Syrian-British writer and journalist Rana Haddad has worked widely in print media and TV as a researcher, editor, producer, and translator. At the same time, she writes poetry, and fiction. An illustrated book of her poems, The Boy Moon: Lost Love Poems Found in an Envelope, appeared in 2008.

Now her debut novel, The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor, has been published by Hoopoe – an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press As in her poetry book, the moon is a recurring symbol in Haddad’s novel.

Haddad has a degree in English literature from Cambridge University in the UK. She told Al-Hayat:“ I tried to write fiction in my twenties but it was impossible for me then, it always turned out too poetic. I needed to learn to become more practical. Journalism, and especially working in television I think helped me with that, especially the structure aspect of fiction over such a long canvas.” (See the interview with Rana Haddad on this blog).

Dunya Noor, the heroine of Haddad’s novel, grows up in the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in the 1980s. She is the daughter of Syria’s most famous heart surgeon Dr Joseph Noor and his glamorous blonde English wife Patricia.

Haddad herself grew up in Latakia, daughter of a Syrian father, and a Dutch-Armenian mother. She left Syria at the age of fifteen and has lived since then mainly in London, but also in Paris, Madrid and, for a short time, Beirut. She says the plot of her novel is “very much a fiction, but the settings and impressions are all mine. This is the Syria I lived in as a child and teenager and later visited over the years.”

She dedicates her novel to Syria and its children and also to her father Marwan, “whose love for his country was deep and unbreakable.”

The novel brings 1980s and 1990s Syria vividly to life. Haddad writes with candour and humour and, through satire shows the pressures and restrictions facing people living under a repressive regime.

Though the novel is set in a system that curbs freedom, Haddad’s writing is full of light and is rich in poetry, songs, music, and engaging depictions of characters and places. Haddad wrote almost all the poetry in the book. An exception is a song made famous by Egyptian singer Abdel-Halim Hafez, “The Coffee Cup Reader”, the words of which Haddad translates. In the novel, a female fortune teller who reads coffee grounds plays a crucial part in the plot.

Dunya is a unique creation. Her father is well connected in the upper echelons of Syrian society, and the family lives in luxury. But Dunya does not comply with what is expected of a girl of her age and class. She has inherited her father’s mop of curly black hair rather than her mother’s blonde locks. She shows much independence of spirit and is endlessly curious about the mysteries she perceives around her.

When Dunya first falls in love, at the age of eight, the object of her love is an old-fashioned camera which she buys from a shop. The old shopkeeper tells her it “a box of light, a machine that can see. If you buy it I promise to teach you its secrets.” As an adult, Dunya becomes an art photographer whose work is shown at exhibitions. References to light and photography occur throughout Haddad’s novel.

Dunya is very interested in love, a subject she researches. Her parents are shocked when they learn from gossip that she has been seen hand in hand with a fisherman’s son who refers to her as his fiancée. Dunya discovered that real love was love at first sight, which “was produced when twin souls happened to look into each other’s eyes”, but in her relationship with the fisherman’s son she had done nothing but cause a scandal.

The concept of twins is entwined with the novel’s intricate plot. There are echoes of Shakespeare plays featuring twins and mistaken identities, such as The Comedy of Errors – which has two pairs of male twins - or Twelfth Night with its male and female twins Sebastian and Viola. Viola disguises herself as her brother by wearing men’s clothes.

At the age of thirteen, Dunya gets into serious political trouble after a woman school instructor in Youth Military Education orders the pupils to take part in a political demonstration. Dunya refuses to take part, and then refuses to apologise for her absence. Nor does she accept the punishment of crawling like a caterpillar along the cement playground.

Dunya’s defiance enrages the instructor Miss Huda, “a twenty-two-year-old despot with scary contacts in the Baath Party and extra-black kohl that she used to enhance her terror-inducing eyes”. When the instructor asks “is this because you are against the Baath Party?” Dunya nods her head. Miss Huda says “Yes? Did you say yes? Say it, say it to my face, say the word! Are you against our great Baath Party?” Dunya replies “Yes”.

Miss Huda rushes to the local headquarters of the Baath Party to inform them of Dunya’s grave offence. Patricia, realising the danger her daughter is in, rushes her to the airport and flies with her to the safety of her grandparents in England. Dunya’s parents decide it is safer for Dunya to stay in England, “for how could anyone be sure she would not open her mouth and tell the truth again?”

But despite being “50 percent English” Dunya finds it hard to adapt to life in England and is critical of English society. English teenagers appear to be fixated on sex, but never mention love. She had left her heart in Syria, but it would be ten years before she would see the country again.

One day Dunya sees and photographs a handsome young man sitting on a bench in London reading a book with the Arabic title “Biography of the Moon”. The pair are instantly attracted to each other: “Love came to them like lightning, the way they’d both heard it sometimes did.”

Hilal is a brilliant student, winner of the Aleppo University Physics Prize physics, which included a full postgraduate grant to study in London. He is studying the moon. His parents are tailors, his father Said a Sunni and his mother Suad an Alawite. Originally from southern Syria, they had fled to Aleppo from their families when they got married. But they remain unhappy. “The source of his parents’ unhappiness became more and more of a mystery to Hilal as the years went by.”

 Dunya secretly starts living with Hilal, without the knowledge of his or her parents. When Hilal does not hear from his parents for six months, and then receives a letter from his mother saying his father had died, he returns to Syria with Dunya.

Dunya’s father Dr Noor, a Christian, is furious that his daughter is in love with a Muslim from a humble family of tailors in Aleppo. He orders him to leave Latakia for Aleppo and to never have anything to do with Dunya again. Dunya tells her mother she will never give Hilal up. But the next day she finds he has vanished from the hotel where he was staying in in Latakia. The hotel [male] receptionist say he was taken away by two men in a Mercedes with darkened windows. To Dunya it is clear he has been abducted by Baath Party members or the mukhabarat.

Dunya travels to Aleppo in search of Hilal and sees in the street a young man who looks just like him. She follows him to an all-men’s café and finds he is a hakawati named Najim. He plays the oud, performs songs and engages in repartee with the customers. When he invites Dunya to his home, and he tears off his moustache and men’s clothes and reveals himself as a stunningly beautiful girl, Suha, a baker’s daughter.

Dunya is dazzled by Suha, and her rapturous infatuation with her overshadows even the memory of her beloved Hilal. Suha tries to helps her Dunya find Hilal, and gradually the mysteries within The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor are revealed.
Susannah Tarbush, London

Karl Sharro tweets and maps his unique brand of Middle Eastern satire in debut book

August 30, 2018, 3:58 am

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The Lebanese-British satirist and architect Karl Sharro’s debut book And Then God Created the Middle East and said ‘Let There be Breaking News', published recently in London by Saqi Books, defies categorisation. It is primarily a book of humour, but it arguably also deserves a place in other sections of a bookstore or library, such as the Middle East, politics or media studies.

The book is authored in the name of Karl reMarks, the brand name of Sharro’s “Middle East political and cultural online commentary, with frequent forays into satire.” Sharro founded his blog in 2007 and the @KarlreMarks Twitter account two years later. His trademark avatar is a bearded figure with a conical hat, against a red background, taken from his cartoon series “The Phoenicians Invented Everything".

Sharro is a master of the Twitter form, with his pithy one-liners and tweeted diagrams. The book provides many examples of both (the Karl reMarks Twitter self-description includes "Director of the Institute of Internet Diagrams"). The @KarlreMarks Twitter account has 135,000 followers and its witticisms and commentary are essential daily reading for many.

As noted in an interview with Qantara.de Sharro was interviewed at the launch of his book by senior lecturer in International Journalism at City, London University Dr Zahera Harb, who said he manages to say in 140 characters what may take her hours to explain to her students. It seems the book will be put on her studentsʹ reading lists and it looks a safe bet that other university or school teachers will do the same.

Sharro told Qantara "I know that several professors do include my blog and tweets on some syllabuses already, and having the tweets in book form will "make it easier for students to find them."

Asked at the launch whether he welcomed the doubling of the permitted length of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters, Sharro said: "I think 280 characters is really awful. Seriously, he greatest thing about Twitter is learning to express yourself in a very short medium. If anything, they should have introduced 'Twitter extreme' with only 70 characters!"

                                                               Karl Sharro   Photo credit James Berry 

Sharro's book is divided into 10 sections, including Geography for Dummies, War and Peace, Extremism: A Study and Democracy for Realists, and ending with a selection of his Bar Jokes. His best-known bar joke is probably the one about Umm Kulthum, the legendary Egyptian diva: “Umm Kulthum walks into a bar. Walks into a bar. Walks into a bar. Walks into a baaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” On Fairouz, the famous Lebanese singer, we have “Fairouz walks into a bar. The moon caresses the olive tree."

Sharro often lampoons Western journalists and analysts: in fact the full Tweet from which the title of his book is taken is "And Then God Created the Middle East and said 'Let There be Breaking News and Analysis'."  The final two words had to be dropped for reasons of space.

One tweet runs: “A telling Western phrase about the Middle East is ‘borders were drawn without regard to ethnicity’, as if it’s a bad thing. I mean, if they had divided states by ethnicity, my grandmother’s old neighbourhood in Baghdad would have been four different countries.” Also,"I'm deeply grateful to Westerners who, despite being in the midst of a historic crisis of their own, still take the time to lecture us."

Tweets in the "Geography for Dummies" section include: “People often ask me ‘where is the Middle East?’ It’s the area between Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Turkey and the British Museum." The "Sykes and Picot Go Out for a Pizza" diagram shows a pizza hacked into a  crude jigsaw with the characteristic straight lines of imperial borders.

The book would have been incomplete without Sharro's classic "Simple One-Sentence Explanation for What Caused ISIS" - which extends over two pages. In 2006 a video of his reciting the endlessly convoluted sentence went viral and had 1.6 million views on Facebook alone. He recently posted on YouTube this new video of the "Simple One-Sentence ..." recorded on the banks of the River Thames: :

"You want the Simple One-Sentence Explanation for What Caused ISIS? Here goes...." 

Western journalists covering the Middle East may well identify with the following tweet: “We Arabs are like, ‘You can’t report on Arab countries without learning Arabic.” Learns Arabic. ‘Why do you know Arabic? You must be a spy'.”

Sharro's satirical eye often focuses on Arab politics. "After the Arab awakening comes the Arab siesta" and "Many people are asking me why I'm not commenting on the Arab Summit. Not into them anymore,  I preferred their early work.".The section on "Extremism: A Study" pokes fun at ISIS, through tweets such as  "I personally don't think we should worry about ISIS. Launching a magazine was a fatal mistake. It will bankrupt them within years""I love statistics like 'bees have killed more people than ISIS'. True, but bees aren't a death cult" and "How many ISIS jihadis does it take to change a lightbulb? ... What's wrong with eternal darkness?" 

The pages of Sharro's book are liberally sprinkled with diagrams. His endearing Phoenician characters Abdeshmun and Hanno appear in two cartoon strips  - "The Phoenicians Invent Speech Bubbles" and "The Phoenicians Invent Polytheism".

  The Phoenicians Invent Speech Bubbles © Karl Sharro

He uses maps to make powerful points. The "Map of Western Invasions of the Middle East vs The Other Way Round" shows numerous coloured arrows ;pointing from Europe and America towards the Middle East and North Africa - contrasted with a few arrows the other way round. The maps in "Six New Ways to Divide the Middle East and North Africa" use different colours to divide the region in terms of eg "Jeans / Traditional""Olive oil / Oil""Kings / Generals / Other", reminiscent in style of maps in Western publications.

Western Invasions of the Middle East vs The Other Way Round

© Karl Sharro

Q&A with Karl Sharro / Karl reMarks

Karl Sharro was born in Zahle, Lebanon, in 1971 to a Lebanese father and Iraqi mother, and is from a Syriac Christian background.  According to his blogpost "I Wrote My Own Wikipedia Biography" while at school he used to pass short funny messages to his schoolmates, “acquiring a skill that would be useful later in life on Twitter.” He moved in 2002 from Beirut to London, where he still lives and works.

In addition to his numerous blog posts and tweets, Sharro's work has been featured in many print and online publications, from the Wall Street Journal to the Guardian and POLITICO, as well as on broadcast media such as the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and Channel 4.  He sometimes gives lectures and TedX Talks. Earlier this year he presented the BBC radio documentary "Skiing Mount Lebanon."

The book's design is very appealing. Did you always envisage a small format book that could be slipped into a pocket (and that could make a good, affordable present) and how was the colour scheme decided? 

Sharro: Yes, the idea from the beginning was for a small format book which would be practical and affordable. I am grateful to Saqi’s team for the great work on the design. It was particularly challenging to get all of the title on the cover and I think it looks brilliant. My own colour scheme is red, so the blue was a change, but we wanted a nod to Twitter.

Did you think of including some of your blog posts and articles in the book?

Sharro: In the beginning I considered including some of the blog posts but ultimately they didn’t fit the format of the book and its small size. I also considered adding one or two of my Lebanese recipes as a bonus but that didn’t make it in the book either. However I will offer to send the recipes to anyone who buys the book. Perhaps there will be another book in the future which will include the blog posts.

Many of your fans first got to know your satire and analysis through your blog as well as Twitter. You posted a peak of 106 blogposts in 2013. But by 2017, the postings had dwindled to just one post – on the first anniversary of the EU Referendum – and so far this year to zero. After initially embracing the blog form, why have you abandoned it so decisively? After all, you do still write longer pieces for a variety of media outlets and you contributed a substantial piece to the book  Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic (Saqi).

Sharro: I decided in 2016 to stop writing on the blog, and the few posts written after that were one-offs. I had gotten to the point where the blog wasn’t receiving the same number of readers and the same level of interest. I think it was a combination of blogs suffering overall - I blame podcasts - and my writing becoming a bit repetitive. There were two factors that led to my decision. Firstly it was getting harder to sustain the energy for writing so frequently - I have only my lunch break to write in - and after years it was exhausting. Secondly, I was considering other formats. I was doing a pilot for a TV show at the time and was thinking of other ways of doing satire. Two years later, I am still thinking.

What are you hoping to achieve through the book?

Sharro: I think the reason I wanted to collect the tweets into a book is to give them a more permanent home, beyond Twitter where they eventually get lost.

The launch of your book at The Book Club in Shoreditch, East London, at which you were in conversation with Dr Zahera Harb, went down very well with the audience. You are due to appear at the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival in London on 4 October . Are other events in the offing? 

Sharro: I am planning one other event so far, at Oxford University’s Middle East Centre in November, but hopefully there will be others.

Which humorists in the UK, US or elsewhere do you particularly rate, and perhaps see as influences?

Sharro: I think my first comedic influence was Woody Allen, particularly in his writing and stand-up comedy. I learned a lot from that. Technically I think Stewart Lee is one of the best, and I love Jack Dee’s early work in particular. Jerry Sadowitz is another influence, his comedy work was amazing for me. And in terms of style, I’ve always liked Mark Steel. I will probably be criticised for not including any women on this list. And the eternal wit of Dorothy Parker.

  

CNN interview with Karl Sharro shows  his "Diagram of Political Relationships in the Middle East" - one of the illustration in And Then God Created the Middle East and Said 'Let There be Breaking News' 

These days we often hear about the rise of Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim comedy  in the UK and elsewhere.  Do you feel comfortable with such categorisations?

Sharro: A lot of my stuff is about the Arab angle, so that I don’t mind so much but I find it strange when it goes into religion, partially because in Lebanon this is just not done. It would be very strange for someone to describe themselves as a Muslim comedian or Christian comedian there. But ultimately I don’t want to be known just for that, if I ever decide to take up comedy I wouldn’t want to be known as the Arab comedian. My ideal stand-up routine is actually about the etiquette of space travel, nothing to do with the Middle East.

Your first stand-up performance, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, seems to have given you a taste for stand-up. Are you planning further performances? 

Sharro: I enjoyed that a lot, although people thought I was crazy to do a 45 minute routine for my standup debut. I should do more, particularly that I took the trouble to memorise the routine, but I haven’t yet decided on the venue and the timing.

Given the variety of comedy genres in which you have been involved, what lies ahead for Karl reMarks?

Sharro:  I have for a few years been  thinking of doing podcasts or vlogging, but I seem to never find the energy or the time. Perhaps after my children grow up -  if the Middle East is still in the news by then.

report and interview by Susannah Tarbush


a clip from Karl Sharro's stand-up at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2017

Saqi Books announces that Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela wins Saltire Award

December 6, 2018, 4:57 am

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press release from Saqi Books Elsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela wins Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award We are absolutely thrilled to share the news that Leila Aboulela has won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2018 for Elsewhere, Home. The winners of Scotland’s most prestigious annual book awards were announced on Friday 30 November at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. Sarah Mason, the programme director for the Saltire Society, said: ‘This year’s awards are a testament to the outstanding calibre of modern Scottish literature in all its varied forms. Every one of the awards was hotly contested, making the judges’ decisions particularly challenging.’ Our extended congratulations to all the award winners. A Guardian Summer Read, Elsewhere, Home deftly captures the search for home in our fast-changing world, offering a rich tableau of life as an immigrant. It is the most recent work by British-Sudanese writer and playwright Leila Aboulela, whose novels have been translated into more than fourteen languages. To celebrate, we’re offering 20% off Elsewhere, Home when ordered direct from the Al Saqi Bookshop. Simply enter Saltire2018 at checkout to claim your discount. ‘A lovely collection about love, loneliness and spirituality’ Nadiya Hussain, Good Housekeeping ‘A beautiful collection … There is so much quiet brilliance.’ The Observer   ‘Thoughtful, wry, funny … The deceptively quiet tales in Elsewhere, Home are barbed with tension and conflict.’ Scotland Herald Facebook Twitter Instagram Website Copyright © 2018 Saqi Books, All rights reserved.

Saqi to publish Raphael Cormack's book on women who created Egypt’s modern culture

December 13, 2018, 1:14 am

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Saqi to publish story of Cairo’s female cultural trailblazers in the early twentieth century

Saqi Books has announced that it has acquired the world rights to Martyrs of Passion: The Women Who Created Egypt’s Twentieth-Century Culture from debut writer Raphael Cormack. Publication is set for spring 2020. 

Raphael Cormack

"Martyrs of Passiontells the exciting, little-known story of Egypt’s entertainment industry in the inter-war period through the lives of its most prominent women," says Saqi. "In what was then the cultural centre of the region, singers were pressing hit records, new theatres and dramatic troupes were springing up everywhere, and Cairo’s cabarets were packed – a counter-culture was on the rise. In the bars, hash-dens, music halls and theatres of the roaring ’20s, people of all cultures, classes and backgrounds – Muslims, Christians and Jews – came together. A passionate group of eccentrics, narcissists and idealists strove to entertain the broad spectrum of Egyptian society.

"Women asserted themselves on the stage and behind the microphone like never before. Some of the biggest stars of Cairo’s stages were female. Two of the most famous troupes of the 1920s were run by women. It was in the 1920s that Oum Kalthoum, the legendary singer, first won her fame. And in the 1920s, the casino and dancehall owned and run by Badia Masabni became the hottest nightspot in town, and one of the early pioneers of Egyptian cinema, Aziza Amir, came up through the stage. These were women who were not afraid to fight for their rights."

Cormack's book is set among the theatres, cabarets, music halls and cinemas of Cairo, It will present a unique view of the cultural, social and feminist movements in early twentieth-century-Egypt, and show how this global scene laid the foundations of Arabic popular culture.

Raphael Cormack says, ‘I’m very excited to be able to tell the compelling and captivating stories of the women of Cairo’s interwar nightlife and entertainment industry. It is a world full of eccentric characters, revolutionary ideas and provocative art, that is little known among English readers. For me, Saqi is the perfect publisher to work with; they have long experience of publishing books on the Middle East and we share an understanding of what makes this history so important.’

Lynn Gaspard, publisher at Saqi acquired world rights directly from Raphael Cormack. She said, ‘Raphael has been a friend to Saqi for many years. I am thrilled to be working with him on Martyrs of Passion, which tells the riveting story of modern Cairo as we have never heard it before. Now is the time for Arab women to reclaim their place in herstory, and I’m very proud to be working with Raphael who in this book is celebrating these female cultural icons’ triumphs.’

Raphael Cormack has a first in classics from Oxford and a PhD in Egyptian theatre from the University of Edinburgh. He co-edited the first collection of Sudanese stories translated from Arabic, The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press). One of the stories in this collection won the Caine Prize 2017. He is also currently editing for Comma The Book of Cairo, which will appear next. He has written on Arabic culture for the London Review of Books, TLS, Apollo, Prospect and elsewhere.

Saqi says that for all rights outside the UK, enquiries should be addressed to  Elizabeth Briggs elizabeth@saqibooks.com

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PEN Translates award goes to 'Palestine +100' among tittles from 15 countries

December 18, 2018, 2:02 am

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The latest batch of Pen Translates awards includes one book - with multiple authors and translators - to be translated from Arabic: Palestine +100 due to be published by Manchester-based Comma Press in May 2019.
Comma Press said in a statement: "We're delighted to announce we've won a PEN Translates Award for our forthcoming anthology Palestine +100, which will fund the translation of a number of the stories from Arabic into English.

"The collection is the sequel to our hit Iraq +100 anthology, which went viral on social media, selling out in advance of publication and featuring on BBC News and The Guardian website. The rights were sold to Tor (Pan Macmillan) for a North American edition shortly after in our biggest rights deal to date.
"This time we asked Palestinian writers to imagine their country 100 years after the Nakba;  in the year 2048, what will have been the repercussions of the displacement of more than 700,000 people after the Israeli War of Independence, and how might Palestine have finally escaped it, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line?
"Palestine +100 will be released in May 2019 and will feature established and emerging authors from Palestine including Selma Dabbagh, Nayrouz Qarmout, Ahmed Masoud and many more.. Huge thanks to the team at English PEN! Congrats to the other award winners."

Nayrouz Qarmout 
Press Release from English PEN 
A diverse list of books make up the latest round of PEN Translates award winners. These include new novels by László Krasznahorkai and Marie Darrieussecq; the debut short story collection by politician Selahattin Demirtaş, currently imprisoned in Turkey; a memoir by legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman; Spanish poetry for children; as well as novels from Bosnia, the Comoros Islands, and Indonesia.
Ros Schwartz, co-chair of the Writers in Translation committee, said:
'The list of award-winning titles is more diverse than ever, with translations from 15 countries and 12 languages, including Bosnian, Indonesian, Slovenian and Tamil, with the first ever novel from the Comoros Islands to be translated into English. English PEN is thrilled and proud to be supporting such an exciting range of outstanding titles.'

Books are selected for PEN Translates awards on the basis of outstanding literary quality, strength of the publishing project, and contribution to literary diversity in the UK. The award-winning books are featured on the English PEN World Bookshelf website, in partnership with Foyles.

PEN Translates award-winning titles in autumn 2018

Mountain That Eats Men by Ander Izagirre, translated from Spanish by Tim Gutteridge. ZED Books, May 2019. Country of origin: Spain

My Mother Said by Chantal Ackerman, translated from French by Daniella Shreir. Silver Press, June 2019. Country of origin: Belgium

An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Juana Adcock. Charco Press, October 2019. Country of origin: Colombia

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated from Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein. Harvill Secker, March 2020. Country of origin: Indonesia

Poems That the Wind Blew In by Karmelo C. Iribarren, translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. Emma Press, September 2019. Country of origin: Spain

A History of the World with the Women Put Back In by Kerstin Lücker and Ute Daenschel, translated from German by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Jessica West. The History Press, September 2019. Country of origin: Germany

The Baby by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from French by Penny Hueston. Text Publishing, July 2019. Country of origin: France

When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back by Naja Marie Aidt, translated from Danish by Denise Newman. Quercus, March 2019. Country of origin: Denmark

Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş, translated from Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson. Hogarth, April 2019. Country of origin: Turkey

A Drop of Happiness by Selvedin Avdić, translated from Bosnian by Will Firth. Istros Books, March 2020. Country of origin: Bosnia

Palestine +100 by various, translated from Arabic by various. Comma Press, May 2019. Country of origin: Palestine

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang. Tilted Axis, May 2020. Country of origin: China

Baron Wenkheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Tuskar Rock Press, November 2019. Country of origin: Hungary

Dreams by Rajathi Salma, translated from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy. Tilted Axis Press, October 2020. Country of origin: India

A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Jacaranda Books, 2019. Country of origin: Comoros Islands

The Fig by Goran Vojnović, translated from Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell. Istros Books, October 2019. Country of origin: Slovenia


English PEN's Writers in Translation programme has been promoting literature in translation since 2005. The programme includes translation grants, events, and PEN Transmissions, an online zine for international writing.
English PEN's major publisher grants programme, PEN Translates, awards grants to UK publishers for translation costs and is supported by Arts Council England. Over 200 books in translation have been supported by English PEN grants since 2005.
English PEN, a registered charity, promotes the freedom to write and the freedom to read in the UK and around the world. The founding centre of a worldwide writers' association, established in 1921, we work to identify and dismantle barriers between writers and readers, whether these are cultural, political, linguistic or economic.

report from London by Susannah Tarbush

New book brings the works of Palestinian artist Nabil Anani to a wider audience

January 15, 2019, 3:45 am

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Stunning collection of images and words celebrates a Palestinian master of composition, colour and symbolism 

by Susannah Tarbush, London

(an Arabic version of this article appeared in Al-Hayat newspaper on 15 January 2019)

The Palestinian artist Nabil Anani, born in the town of Latroun in 1943, has had a long and productive career as a painter, ceramicist, sculptor and art teacher. He has taken part in group and solo exhibitions in many parts of the world and his works are held in museums and private collections.

And yet, according to two of his biggest admirers, Sulieman Mleahat and Martin Mulloy, Aman has not fully received the recognition he deserves. Their determination to bring Anani to wider public attention has now resulted in the publication in London, by Saqi Books, of the beautiful book Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People. The book is co-edited by Mleahat and Mulloy, who have been friends since the days when Mleahat lived in London and they were introduced to each other by a mutual friend.

The 176-page volume contains high-quality reproductions of more than 150 works by Anani. The cover illustration is Anani’s 2013 painting Palestinian Village.

The pictures in the book are grouped into three sections: Land, People, and Mixed Media. They are complemented by substantial essays from six leading Middle Eastern art historians: Rana Anani, Lara Khaldi, Bashir Makhoul, Nada Shabout, Dr Housni Alkhateeb Shehadeh and Dr Tina Sherwell.

The images show the range and variety of Anani’s work, and his immense talents in composition, use of colour, and symbolism. Many are in fresh, bright colours while others are in more sombre hues. Some echo a continuing Palestinian identity and tradition, others are more directly political such as the haunting images of Palestinians queueing at the checkpoint at Qalandia, or standing in a line waiting to see their relatives in prison, as in the 2015 painting Visiting Hour.

Visiting Hour (2015) © Nabil Anani

Anani works in many media in addition to paint, including wool, embroidery, plaster, leather, wood, leather, copper, dyes, and concrete. The works vary greatly in size. Some are relatively small, other are large and extend over double pages of the book, such as the striking and graceful mosaic mural Ramallah Martyrs’ Memorial (2013).  

The Palestinian prize-winning poet Mourid Barghouti has contributed a characteristically eloquent foreword to the volume. He writes:

“In a society living in catastrophic conditions, the artist does not have the luxury of being preoccupied with a single vision. Perhaps this can clarify the enigma of Nabil Anani, the artist and sculptor who opened his eyes to the Palestinian Nakba, which continues to generate more Nakbas."

Barghouti adds: "The works of Nabil Anani simultaneously perform the roles of the novelist, poet, historian, architect, musician and restorer of memory.  His works grasp at moments from people’s lives, their hills, olive groves, homes, their grandmothers’ embroidered gowns, their weddings and funerals, as if their creator fears the demise of all these things.

Bride (2005) © Nabil Anani

“In his paintings, Anani is a novelist because he tells the story of a group of people too brutalized to tell their own story. He is a poet when he seizes a single detail here and there: a glancing eye, the tilt of a neck or miles of threatened trees; the frailty in a body in one instance, its amazing power in another. He is a historian when he chronicles through art the events of Palestinian life, its joys and sorrows, the various ways it disappears in spite of joy, and manifests itself in spite of death.”

According to Barghouti, “Anani, the genuine artisan, desires to be unambiguous in his celebration of Palestinian art and nature, as if he were hosting a celebration in which life itself is the guest of honour.”

The book’s Palestinian co-editor Sulieman Mleahat lived in the UK for 28 years after winning a scholarship at the age of ten to the famous Pestalozzi International Village for young people in East Sussex, in the south of England.

He did his university and postgraduate studies in international development in the UK and then, wanting to work with Palestinian refugees, returned to live in Ramallah eight years ago. He is an education and arts specialist working with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) American Near East Refugee Aid in Palestine (ANERA) establishing kindergarten schools and training teachers. At the same time Mleahat supports Palestinian artists in exhibiting their work and has curated in many exhibitions in Ramallah and participated in many art fairs in the Middle East.

Nabil Anani in his studio in Ramallah, 2017

Martin Mulloy had a career in publishing, and was for ten years a director at the BBC. He has lived and worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and travelled widely throughout the region. He now works independently pursing educational and media projects in China and elsewhere.

The two co-editors describe their initiation and implementation of the Anani book project as “a labour of love for us both” The seeds of the project lie in an exhibition of Anani’s solo calligraphic exhibition “Art Into Script” held in 2007 in the gallery of the legendary Foyles bookshop in central London. The two subsequently travelled to Ramallah to meet Anani in his home and studio.

Lynn Gaspard, publisher of Saqi Books, was enthusiastic about Mleahat and Mulloy’s proposal for a book on Anani. Publication was made possible by sponsorship from the A M Qattan Foundation, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), Palestinian Ministry of Culture, the Palestinian Museum, and Paltel.

The book’s six illuminating essays explore many facets of Anani’s work and life. Bashir Makhoul's essay is entitled “The Inability to Forget and the Promise of Memory.” He writes that Anani “has made an outstanding contribution to the development of Palestinian art, and he has played an explicit role in the construction of a modern national identity, particularly in relation to national memory.”

Anani is “constructing a visual narrative from a memory that is living in the menacing shadows cast by the trauma of the Nakba and its continuation in the occupation and ongoing Israeli colonisation of Palestine.”

There is a continuous need in the work “to search for traces of the past, to seek restoration, draw conclusions and pass on messages and symbols of what has been lost in the hope that the Palestinians will one day find it …. This idyllic re-imagining of the past imbued with nostalgia becomes a speculative image of the future – an aspiration for what is to come rather than a memorial for the past.” 

In 2012 Anani started a series of works Life Before 1948 based on photographs taken of families around Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.  by photographers including the Palestinian Khalil Raad. “What really haunts me about these photographs, and what I think Anani captures in his paintings, is the fact that they were taken before the Nakba, They are pictures of unity, of undivided families in a homeland that was about to be torn apart by war and colonial occupation.”

Ayyoub family from Safad (1948) 2014 © Nabil Anani

In her essay “How Childhood Captivated an Artist” the artist’s daughter Rana Anani writes of Nabil’s childhood in Halhul, where his parents moved in 1942. Halhul is particularly known for its grape production.

“Whenever Anani speaks of his childhood in Halhul, his eyes sparkle and his face lights up with great passion,” writes Rana. “We cannot underestimate the extent of the influence of his childhood in that village on the art he was to produce later in life.”

In 1965 Anani’s father sent him to university in Cairo, but was furious when he found out Nabil had insisted on registering at art college, and he cut off his finding. Nabil’s sister Adla who was working in Kuwait, then supported him financially. Anani graduated in Fine Art from Alexandria University in 1969 and returned to Palestine to join UNRWA as an art teacher.

Dr Tina Sherwell examines Anani’s work in the 1970s and 1980s under the harsh restrictions of the Israel occupation, which imposed censorship on artists. In this atmosphere Anani had his first exhibition at the YMCA in Jerusalem in 1972 and at this time he met the artist Sliman Mansour who would become a lifelong friend and colleague. Anani was very active in the formation of the League of Palestinian Artists.

Motherhood II (1995)  © Nabil Anani

During the first intifada which started in December 1987, The New Visions Group was set up by Anani, Tayseer Barakat, Sliman Mansour and Vera Tamari. With a Palestinian shunning of imported Israeli products, including oil paints and canvas these artists began to work with natural local materials such as wood, clay, mud and leather.” Lara Khaldi notes how the New Visions Group moved away from “committed art” into more experimental work.

Nadia Shabout in her chapter “Modernism, Palestine and the Arab World” writes: “It is particularly interesting to understand the intersection of imagination between a Palestinian artist like Anani and, for example, the Iraqi Dia al-Azzawi whose work engaged with Palestine frequently.”

Housni Alkhateeb Shehada’s essay “History, Calligraphy and Landscape in the Works of Nabil Anani (2000 – 2017)” examines Anani’s art works within their political context. He writes: “Undoubtedly. Nabil Anani’s close engagement with the exhausting political situation has for years been reflected in his works.”   He examines Anani’s love of calligraphy and the recurring appearance of landscape and olive trees in his work. “The olive tree is perhaps the most important symbol used by Anani in various works of drawing, painting, sculpture and other genres.”

At a time when interest in Palestinian arts and culture is growing, in Palestine itself and far beyond, the publication of Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People is very much to be welcomed. It is truly one of the most moving and visually-stunning books to have appeared in 2018.

International Prize for Arabic Fiction holds emerging writers' workshop in Sharjah

January 19, 2019, 3:29 am

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group photo from the IPAF Nadwa 2019 

IPAF hosts 10th UAE Nadwa 
Writers’ workshop is held in Sharjah, the World Book Capital for 2019, led by acclaimed Arab writers Iman Humaydan and Muhsin al-Ramli with new support of Department of Culture - Sharjah Government 

Over the  past week a group of eight emerging Arab authors - five women, and three men - has gathered in Sharjah to take part in the 10th International Prize for Arabic Fiction’s annual Nadwa. The workshop, which ran from 8th to 15th January, brought together writers from Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Syria and the UAE. It was sponsored by the Department of Culture - Sharjah Government and took place at the Marbella Resort.

Salha Obeid (UAE)

Sharjah, which has a growing publishing industry and has become a hub in the UAE for book events and organisations, was recently named World Book Capital for the year 2019 by UNESCO for its ongoing efforts to promote books and literacy.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is an annual literary prize for prose fiction in Arabic. It is sponsored by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi) and run with the support, as its mentor, of the Booker Prize Foundation in London.

Iman Humaydan (Lebanon)

This year’s Nadwa was led by two mentors including acclaimed writer of Arabic literature: Iman Humaydan, Lebanese novelist, researcher, and President of PEN Lebanon; and Muhsin Al-Ramli, twice IPAF longlisted Iraqi-Spanish writer, poet and academic. This week the English translation by Luke Leafgren of Al-Ramli’s novel, The President’s Gardens, won the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

Muhsin Al-Ramli (Iraq)

The eight participating writers range in age from 25 to 48 years old and were identified by IPAF as emerging talents, following an application process They are Hasan Akram (Iraq), Yasmin Haj (Palestine), Mamoun Sharaa (Syria), Salha Obeid (UAE), Laila Abdullah (Oman), Wiam Al Madadi (Morocco), Ibrahim Hendal (Kuwait), Eman Al Yousuf (UAE).

Eman Al Yousuf (UAE)

The workshop, which aims to hone their writing skills, involved daily group discussions as well as the opportunity for one-on-one guidance with mentors. The group also attended the 17th Sharjah Arabic Poetry Festival where they met His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah.

The annual workshop has nurtured a number of writers who have gone on to be longlisted, shortlisted and also winners of  IPAF. These include Mohammed Hasan Alwan, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Mohammed Rabie, Ahmed Saadawi, and Shahla Ujayli, who is one of this year’s IPAF longlisted authors.

Laila Abdullah (Oman)

Iman Humaydan, novelist and Nadwa mentor, said: “It was an indescribable, deep delight and joy for me to witness the positive and fruitful interaction between this special group of creative talents: new, confident, aspiring writers. I would like to highlight the importance of this wonderful Nadwa, in providing a creative space for emerging writers. I am extremely optimistic about the impact of this important annual project, which offers new writers not only a space to write, but also the chance to form friendships in which culture and creativity are openly shared between participants coming from different Arab countries.” 

Khalid Muslit, co-ordinator and supervisor of the Nadwa from Department of Culture — Sharjah Government, said: “Holding the workshop of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in Sharjah emirate is a unique experience and opportunity for emerging intellectuals. Sharjah embraces young writers and artists and is internationally recognised as a beacon of culture. It has been chosen as the World Book Capital 2019 by the international jury of UNESCO. The workshop offers young talented writers the chance to refine their skills as they write short stories and novels which enrich literary life and will be a valuable addition to Arabic and non-Arabic bookshops.” 


BIOGRAPHIES

MENTORS 

Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese novelist and researcher, born in 1956. She is the author of four novels, all have been published in English: B as in Beirut (1997), Wild Mulberries (2001), Other Lives (2010) and The Weight of Paradise (2016). Her novels have also been translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch. From 2007 to 2014, she taught Creative Writing as part of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA, and she has given several workshops in different European universities. Since 2015, she has taught Creative Writing at the University of Paris 8 in France. It is the first time this subject has been taught in the Arabic language at the university. Humaydan is a founding member of Lebanese PEN, currently its president, and a board member of International Pen. She is working on her fifth novel.

Muhsin Al-Ramli is an Iraqi-Spanish writer, poet, academic and translator, born in northern Iraq in 1967. He has lived in Madrid since 1995 and received his doctorate in Literature and Philosophy from Madrid University. He writes in both Arabic and Spanish. Since 1985, he has worked as a cultural journalist for the Arab, Spanish and Latin American press, and has translated many literary works from Arabic into Spanish and vice versa. He has published more than thirty books, ranging from short stories to poetry, plays, translations and novels.

Al-Ramli's novels include: Scattered Crumbs (2000), whose English translation won the 2002 American Translation Award sponsored by the University of Arkansas Press. His novels Fingers of Dates (2009) and The President’s Gardens (2012) reached the IPAF longlist in 2010 and 2013. The English edition of The President’s Gardens translated by Luke Leafgren won the 2016 Pen Translates Award and the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. His novel The Wolf of Love and Books (2015) was shortlisted for the 2015 Sheikh Zayed Book Award. His most recent book is Children and Shoes (2018). Most of his works have been translated into other languages. He is the co-founder (in 1997) and co-director of the publishing house and philosophical and cultural review Alwah in Spain, and has run creative writing workshops in Spain, Mexico, Kuwait and the UAE. He currently teaches at Saint Louis University, the American University in Madrid.

PARTICIPANTS

Hasan Akram graduated from Al-Qadisiya University, Iraq, with a BA in Biology. For the past few years, he has worked as an editor and trustee of the Iraqi publishing house Dar alRafidain. His most recent literary project was editing and writing the introduction to The Encyclopedia Man, by acclaimed Iraqi writer Hasan Blasim and published by Dar al-Rafidain. He was a participant in a creative writing workshop run by Ahmed Saadawi, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Aged 25, he is the youngest author taking part in this year’s Nadwa. Akram was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1993.

Yasmin Haj is a Palestinian writer, editor and translator. She completed her Masters in Comparative Literature at Toronto University. She is a founder of the “Dalala” co-operative for translating literary, critical and academic writing from and into English and Arabic. She has written articles for the “Palestine” supplement of the Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper. She lives in Paris. Yasmin Haj was born in Nazareth in 1988.

Mamoun Sharaa is a Syrian writer, researcher and editor. He graduated from the Agricultural College of Damascus University. From 2001-12, he worked at the Ministry of Culture in Damascus. Since 2013, he has been an editor at the publishing house Dar al-Kutub run by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. He has two published works: Bibliography of the Theatre in the Arabic Language (2010) and Bibliography of the Cinema in the Arabic Language (2012). His book Encyclopedia of Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature will be published soon. Sharaa was born in Syria in 1970.

Salha Obeid is an Emirati writer. Her first book of short stories, Alzheimers, was published in 2010 and was translated into German the following year. Her next two collections were: Postman of Happiness (2012) and iPad of Life in the Manner of Zorba (2014). Her third book An Implicitly White Lock of Hair (2015) won the 2016 Al Owais Award for Creative Writing. She is a member of the council of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and the Association of Emirati Women Writers, and founder of the “Society of the Intellectual” project. She was awarded the Young Emiratis Prize (creative writing category) in 2017, for her literary work. Her first novel, Maybe It’s a Joke, was published in 2018.

Laila Abdullah (formerly known as Laila al-Baloushi) is an Omani writer. She has previously published a blog called I Breathe Calmly and had a weekly column in various Omani and Arab newspapers, including the Emirati Al-Ru’ya, the Omani Al-Ru’ya and the London-based AlArab. In 2014 she published two books, Hypothetical Love Letters between Henry Miller and Anais Nin and Worries of the World’s Room, which won the 2015 Muscat Prize for the best collection of articles. In 2016, she published a short story collection entitled My Narrative Beings, which won the Muscat Short Story Prize of that year. Her book A Sofa, a Book and a Cup of Coffee, about reading, was published under her new writing name in 2018. She is also the author of two children’s books and a novel, Pharaoh’s Notebook (2018). Some of her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Polish and Spanish. Abdullah was born in 1982.

Wiam Al Madadi is a Moroccan novelist and short story writer. She is currently studying for her doctorate in translation at the College of Arts and Human Sciences, Abdel Malik Al Saadi University, Tetouan. She has a number of published research papers, translations and articles, as well as literary work ranging from poetry to short stories, novels and children’s books. She has won several prizes, including the 2010 Moroccan Writers’ Union Prize for the Short Story for her 2010 collection Whiteness; the 2012 Dar al-Watan Prize for the Very Short Story for her story ‘Who Stole the Mona Lisa’s Smile?’ and the 2015 Al-Tayeb Salih International Award for Creative Writing (first prize) for her 2015 novel The Gypsy. Al Madadi was born in 1989.

Ibrahim Hendal is a Kuwaiti writer. He has been writing in Kuwaiti newspapers and Arab media since 2010, and participated in the first Cairo Literary Festival in 2015. In 2012, he published a short story collection entitled Borges and Me, and in 2017 his novel Coloured Cities came out. He is currently working on another short story collection. He has founded several reading clubs and cultural forums, including the “Qadimun” forum and the “Diwan” reading club. Hendal was born in 1985.

Eman Al Yousuf is an Emirati writer. She is a chemical engineer and certified coach in graphology. She has published three short story collections and two novels: The Window that Saw (2014) and Guard of the Sun (2015), which won the 2016 Emirates Novel Award. Her third novel The Resurrection of Others will be available soon. She has also published a book of literary interviews with female Emirati writers, Bread and Ink (2015). She has a weekly column in the Emirati newspaper ‘Al-Ru’ya’, called ‘Woman of the Pen’ and a monthly literary column called ‘Under the Ink’ in the Emirates Culture Magazine. Her short story The Teapot and I was made into a play and was the UAE submission at the fifth Gulf Festival for Art and Literature. She wrote the first short feminist Emirati film, Ghafa, directed by Aisha Alzaabi, and she is the first Emirati woman to be chosen for the University of Iowa’s international writing programme in the United States. Al Yousuf was born in 1987.

IPAF 2019 Longlist 
Last week the longlist for the 12th prize was announced and includes 16 novels selected by the judges from 134 entries, all published in Arabic between July 2017 and June 2018. The full 2019 longlist, listed in alphabetical order by author surname, is Women Without Trace by Mohammed Abi Samra, Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate by Omaima Abdullah Al-Khamis, The Night Mail by Hoda Barakat, Women of the Five Senses by Jalal Bargas, The Commandments by Adel Esmat, Mohammed's Brothers by Maysalun Hadi, Black Foam by Huji Jaber, The Outcast by Inaam Kachachi, May — The Nights of Isis Copia by Waciny Laredj, What Sin Caused her to Die? by Mohammed Al-Maazuz, I Killed My Mother in Order to Live by May Menassa, Western Mediterranean by Mbarek Rabi, Me and Haim by Habib Sayah, Summer with the Enemy by Shahla Ujayli, The Mexican Wife by Iman Yehia and Cold White Sun by Kafa Al-Zou’bi.

The shortlist will be announced on 5 February, and the winner will be revealed on 23 April.

Susannah Tarbush - report based on press release issued on behalf of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) by Four Communications. 

Palestinian singer Reem's Kelani's EP 'Why Do I Love Her?' released to critical acclaim

February 6, 2019, 11:37 pm

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Reem Kelani's EP: Why Do I Love Her?

Palestinian singer and musician Reem Kelani’s digital EP Why Do I Love Her?saw its commercial release on 1 February 2019. It comprises four tracks:

- "Last Night, O Saud", a love song from Kuwait, from Reem’s formative years there;

- "Going up the Mountain", a traditional Palestinian song from the Galilee, which Reem has already been busy introducing to school and community choirs across the UK;

- “Why Do I Love Her?” The title track of the EP, Reem wrote the lyrics and music of this song to describe her anguished love for Palestine;

- "Mama Don’t Allow", an American blues number Reem used to sing to her mother, rendered in her unique fashion as an Arabic jazz singer, and influenced by her father’s fascination for the American songbook.

The songs were recorded live by Gurjit Dhinsa at the Tabernacle as part of Nour Festival on 12 October 2016: Reem was joined in the concert by  her trusty trio of Bruno Heinen (piano), Ryan Trebilcock (double bass) and Antonio Fusco (drums).The tracks were subsequently  mixed by Steve Lowe and Reem.

The EP can be bought via Bandcamp.com  here  [ https://reemkelani.bandcamp.com/album/why-do-i-love-her ]

Meanwhile, work continues apace on Reem's next album This Land is Your Land, and on her long-term research on the Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish (albeit hostage to the political situation in Egypt and to financing).

As Reem writes in her notes to the EP:

"In October 2016, I performed with my wonderful band at the Tabernacle in London for a second time as part of the Nour Festival of Arts, copromoted by Arts Canteen.

"The concert afforded the opportunity for the launch of my second album Live at the Tabernacle (Fuse Records, 2016). We also decided to record the gig for good measure, and I am proud to present this digital EP, comprising four songs from that memorable evening.

"The songs, which have never been released before, range from a Kuwaiti love song that I learnt as a child, to a subversive traditional Palestinian song from the Galilee, a self-penned title track about my anguished love for Palestine, and a blues number that I always sang for my late mother.
In short, these four songs constitute an autobiographical roundtrip between East, West and in between!

"Enjoy this bipolar journey, as much as the band and I enjoyed our travels on the night.
Thank You, Shukran!"


What the critics say:

"Reem Kelani is a powerhouse of a performer, with a voice conveying a rare depth of passion and emotion. This is complemented by her abilities as an arranger that enable her to combine the musical traditions of two cultures almost seamlessly. Although "Why Do I Love Her" comprises a mere four songs, it is the perfect introduction to this great singer and will leave you eagerly awaiting her next release." Richard Marcus, Qantara / Deutsche Welle, 4 February 2019

"Throughout her work, [Reem Kelani] is looking for a musical blend which gives a voice to the Palestinians, the sound of pain and of the Diaspora. In everything she says, the theme of Palestinian agony is expressed in the form of multiple identities, or as Edward Said put it ‘out of place’, and this is what Kelani evokes musically in a global context." [trans.] Jamal Hassan, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, Qatar, 28 January 2019

"Reem has focused on the traditional, as she is known to do, but she hasn’t limited herself to Palestinian folklore... Reem also chose a Kuwaiti song made famous by the two most influential singers in the history of the Kuwaiti song."
[trans.] Hazgui Haikel, Ma3azef online music magazine, 27 January 2019

"Reem Kelani’s style is unique – she mimics no-one. Her musical project is based on the traditional, both in form and in presentation; it also encompasses dramatic expression, but without gratuitous vocal gymnastics. She is a Palestinian artist, whose songs celebrate her heritage, whilst simultaneously acknowledging and conversing with other musical cultures." [trans.] Saleh Elghazy, Al-Qabas, Kuwait, 17 January 2019

"Reem Kelani's new EP is a lovely thing which isn’t getting the attention it undoubtedly deserves. Please do yourself a favour and give it a listen." Jamie Renton, EP featured in Jamie’s Mixcloud selection ‘Bollocks to the Bigots - Funky Sounds for Open Minds’, 13 January 2019

Media details

EP Title
Why do I Love Her?

Record Label
Fuse Records

Producer
Reem Kelani
www.reemkelani.com

EP Booklet Design
Nora Gazzar

Promo Video
Walid Al Wawi

Distributors
Proper Music Distribution

Commercial Release Date
1 February 2019

For press interview, photographs & further information
Chris Somes-Charlton
miktab@reemkelani.com

Reem Kelani Online

Bandcamp: https://reemkelani.bandcamp.com 
Facebook: Reem Kelani
Twitter: ReemKelani
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/reem-kelani
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMiktab/feed
Instagram: reemkelani1948

The Miktab Limited
PO Box 31652
London W11 2YF

posted by Susannah Tarbush, London

An Evening with Luke Leafgren and Muhsin Al-Ramli at Waterstones Piccadilly

February 9, 2019, 1:13 am

≫ Next: Leila Aboulela's 'Elsewhere, Home' showcases the work of an exceptional short story writer

≪ Previous: Palestinian singer Reem's Kelani's EP 'Why Do I Love Her?' released to critical acclaim

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Join prizewinning translator Luke Leafgren and Iraqi novelist Muhsin Al-Ramli at Waterstones, Piccadilly on 14th February for a Banipal Trust event 

An Evening with Luke Leafgren and Muhsin Al-Ramli

Thursday 14th February 18:30 at Waterstones Piccadilly

Free, Registration Only

Book your ticket today

 Waterstones Piccadilly says:

Held in association with the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, Muhsin Al-Ramli and translator Luke Leafgren, will be joining us to discuss this year’s winner of the Banipal Prize, The President’s Gardens.

“A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting.” says Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.

Described as One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, The President’s Gardens is “a profoundly moving investigation of love, death and injustice.” Whilst tragic and deeply rooted in its context, Al-Ramli draws on universal, timeless themes in a novel that addresses “the wider tides of history.”

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize is an annual award of £3,000, made to the translator(s) of a published translation in English of a full-length imaginative and creative Arabic work. The prize seeks to raise the profile of contemporary Arabic literature, as well as honouring the important work of individual translators in bringing the work of established and emerging Arab writers to the attention of the wider world.

Please join us for what promises to be a truly fantastic, celebratory evening of discussion.

Tickets are free, but please register your interest via the Eventbrite link at the bottom of the Waterstones website page on the event.

Leila Aboulela's 'Elsewhere, Home' showcases the work of an exceptional short story writer

February 24, 2019, 5:04 am

≫ Next: Man Booker International Prize 2019 longlist features two titles translated from Arabic

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Elsewhere, Home

by Leila Aboulela

published by Telegram, an imprint of Saqi Books, London

ISBN: 978-1846592119

eISBN: 978 -1846592126

pbk, 224pp, £8.99

Kindle £5.99  / $7.97

review by Susannah Tarbush, London

In 2000 the Sudanese short-story writer, novelist and playwright Leila Aboulela became the first-ever winner of the newly-inaugurated Caine Prize for African Writing, for her short story “The Museum”.  In his speech at the award ceremony, the chair of the judges, Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, described the story as “moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully written". These qualities are evident throughout the substantial body of short fiction she has produced in the two decades since. 

In 2001 Aboulela’s first collection of short stories, Coloured Lights, was published by Scottish publisher Polygon. It was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.

Since then, her short stories have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, and publication of a second collection has been long overdue. The publication by Telegram of such a collection, Elsewhere, Home, is much to be welcomed. Even before publication the book was longlisted in the fiction category of the People’s Book Prize. 

The collection subsequently won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, open to authors of Scottish descent or residing in Scotland," or whose writing  deals with "the work or life of a Scot or with a Scottish question, event or situation." 

Aboulela was among the first contemporary authors in the UK to write from a Muslim perspective. She grew up in Sudan and has had much experience of living in both Muslim and non-Muslim societies. She was living in the Scottish oil city of Aberdeen when she wrote Coloured Lights, and then lived in Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar before returning to Aberdeen where she now lives.

Leila Aboulela pictured by Simon Hollington at the 2005 Edinburgh International Book Festival 

The 13-stories in Elsewhere, Home span Aboulela’s writing career. They include six stories from Coloured Lights, among them “The Museum”. These early stories have stood the test of time, and are more relevant than ever at a time when multiculturalism is being challenged, the extreme right is on the rise in the West, and Muslims feel under increasing pressure. 

One of the more recent stories, “Farida’s Eyes” was first published in 2012 in Banipal issue 44, which focused on 12 Women Writers. Farida is a pupil at a school run by nuns. She realises her eyesight is deteriorating, and her teacher, Sister Carlotta, tells her that she must be fitted with glasses. While Farida’s mother is in favour of this, her father is against, both on grounds of cost and because “she will look ugly in glasses!”

Several stories are linked to Sudan. In “Something Old, Something New” a Scottish convert to Islam travels to Khartoum to marry a divorced woman he had met in Edinburgh at the Sudanese restaurant at which she worked. The wedding arrangements are interrupted by the theft of his passport and camera, and a family bereavement. But after the low-key marriage ceremony he is suddenly bowled over by the sensual beauty of his wife. He wants to tell her so “but the words, any words, wouldn’t come. He was stilled, choked by a kind of brightness.”

The stories often expose misunderstandings between cultures or generations. In “Summer Maze” Nadia and her mother Lateefa, Egyptian immigrants to the UK, are on their annual visit to Cairo. There is a gulf in understanding between them. Nadia, who has lost the ability to speak the Arabic she babbled as a baby, is embarrassed by her mother’s continuing pronouncing of  the English “p” as “b”. Lateefa, on the other hand, has long hoped that her daughter would marry her cousin Khalid, and is devastated to find he is now engaged. It is his fiancée who introduces Nadia to literature by Egyptian authors translated into English, and through reading such books Nadia finds access to her mother’s world. 

In “The Aromatherapist’s Husband” Elaine is a whimsical free spirit, who practises alternative therapies and consults fortune tellers. Her welder husband Adam is plodding and practical, and unable to keep up with a wife who believes in angels and dreams of working at Mother Theresa’s orphanage in Calcutta.

A recent story, “Pages of Fruit”, is addressed in the second person by the female narrator to the woman author she had for years put on a pedestal and with whom she longed to strike up a friendship. Like the narrator, the idolised author is an African from a highly educated family: “Your story was a bridge to a world I had left behind after marriage and migration.”  The narrator used to send letters to the writer, with no reply. Encountering the author years later in Abu Dhabi, where her husband’s work has taken him, the narrator sees her in a more realistic way and is somehow freed. The story may be met with a wry smile from certain readers who encounter a much-admired writer in real life, say at a literary event or festival. 

The central figure in “Expecting to Give” is a lonely and depressed expectant mother whose husband Saif is working on a platform in the North Sea. She suffers sickness, and cravings, especially for tomatoes, and longs for the return of her husband She had been a social worker back in her own country, but her job applications in her new city of residence have been rejected.  An incident in a kebab shop leads her to a confrontation with a mother pushing a toddler in a pushchair. 

 In the story “Majed” Hamid, "born and bred on the banks of the Blue Nile", is married to Scottish convert, Ruqqiyah. She had walked away from her marriage, her two children in tow, in order to be with him and they have had  a baby, Majed, together. In Hamid’s eyes she is “so good, so strong, because she is a convert. But he, he had been a Muslim all his life and was, it had to be said, relaxed about the whole thing. Wrong, yes it was wrong. But he wasn't going to argue about that. Not with Ruqqiyah”. He had married Ruqqiyah because he  needed a residence visa, while as a new convert she needed a Muslim. Hamid drinks whisky surreptitiously, and Ruqqiyah uncovers his secret alcohol habit in an appalling way.  

Despite her output of short fiction, Leila Aboulela is probably best known as an award-winning novelist. Her debut novel The Translator was published by Polygon in 1999. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction, as were the two novels that followed: Minaret (Bloomsbury, 2005) and Lyrics Alley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010). Her fourth  novel The Kindness of Enemies was published by W&N in 2015. Her fifth novel Bird Summons is due to be published by W&N on 7 March. 

Elsewhere, Home shows that in addition to being an outstanding novelist, Aboulela is an exceptional short story writer.  The collection is surely destined to widen her readership and reputation yet further. 

Man Booker International Prize 2019 longlist features two titles translated from Arabic

March 13, 2019, 5:10 am

≫ Next: 'A New Divan - a lyrical dialogue between East and West' to be launched at British Library with an evening of poetry and music

≪ Previous: Leila Aboulela's 'Elsewhere, Home' showcases the work of an exceptional short story writer

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Man Booker International Prize 13-book longlist announced 

Includes two titles translated from Arabic.

The Man Booker International Prize is awarded annually for a single book of fiction - novel or short-story collection - translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Authors and translators are considered to be equally important, with the £50,000 prize being split between them. In addition, each shortlisted author and translator receives £1,000. The judges considered 108 books for the longlist.

Jonathan Wright is longlisted for his translation of Palestinian-Icelandic writer Mazen Maarouf's  collection of short fiction Jokes For The Gunmen, published by the Granta imprint Portebello Books. Wright has enjoyed previous success with the Man Booker International Prize and its predecessor, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which he won in 2014  for his translation of Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim's The Iraqi Christ. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International for his translation of Iraqi writer Ahamed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad. The translation was also shortlisted for the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

Marilyn Booth is longlisted for the first time, for her translation of Omani author Jokha Alharthi's novel Celestial Bodies published by Sandstone Press.

Highlights of the 2019 longlist:

 The 13 books have been translated from nine languages, hailing from 12 countries across three continents 

 Olga Tokarczuk, who won the prize in 2018, appears again alongside her other translator into English, Antonia Lloyd-Jones 

 Samanta Schweblin and her translator Megan McDowell, previously shortlisted in 2017, are longlisted 

 The list includes 8 women - over half of this year’s longlist 

 Longlist dominated by independent publishers: only two are from the larger conglomerates

Award-winning historian, author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, chair of the  judging panel, says: ‘This was a year when writers plundered the archive, personal and political. That drive is represented in our longlist, but so too are surreal Chinese train journeys, absurdist approaches to war and suicide, and the traumas of spirit and flesh. We’re thrilled to share 13 books which enrich our idea of what fiction can do.’

The longlist 

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Arabic - Oman)

translated by Marilyn Booth 

Sandstone Press 

Love In The New Millennium by Can Xue (Chinese - China)

translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

Yale University Press

The Years by Annie Ernaux (French - France)

translated by Alison L. Strayer 

Fitzcarraldo Editions

At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong (Korean - South Korea)

translated by Sora Kim-Russell 

Scribe, UK

Jokes For The Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf (Arabic - Iceland and Palestine)

translated by Jonathan Wright 

Granta, Portobello Books

Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli (French - France)

translated by Sam Taylor 

Granta, Portobello Books

The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann (German - Germany)

translated by Jen Calleja 

Profile Books, Serpent's Tail

Mouthful Of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (Spanish - Argentina and Italy)

translated by Megan McDowell  
Oneworld

The Faculty Of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg (Swedish - Sweden)

translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner

Quercus, MacLehose Press

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish - Poland)

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Fitzcarraldo Editions

The Shape Of The Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Spanish - Colombia)

translated by Anne McLean 

Quercus, MacLehose Press

The Death Of Murat Idrissi by Tommy Wieringa (Dutch - The Netherlands)

translated by Sam Garrett

Scribe, UK

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán (Spanish - Chile and Italy)

translated by Sophie Hughes 
And Other Stories

The longlist was selected by a panel of five judges:  chair, Bettany Hughes; writer, translator and chair of English PEN Maureen Freely; philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs; novelist and satirist Elnathan John, and essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April at an event at Somerset House,London, and the winner will be announced on 21 May at a dinner at the Roundhouse in London. 

Man Booker International Prize events:

The shortlisted and winning authors and translators will take part in a number of events, including: 

Southbank Centre Monday 20 May, 7pm

The night before the 2019 prize winner is unveiled, join this year’s shortlisted authors and translators for an evening of readings in both English and the native languages of the books, and conversation around their books. Plus, a Q&A and book signing.

Waterstones Piccadilly Thursday 23 May, 7pm

Join us for an evening celebrating the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019. A byword for the finest fiction in translation, the prize celebrates literature from all over the world.

Following the announcement of the 2019 prize winner on Tuesday 21 May, join this year’s winning author and translator for an evening of readings in both English and the native language of their book. This will be followed by a discussion about writing the book and experience of winning the prize, an audience Q&A and book signing.

More events will be announced in due course. 

Book synopses and biographies

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi 
Translated by Marilyn Booth from Arabic, published by Sandstone Press

Celestial Bodies is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society which is slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, it tells of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves. The judges said: ‘A richly imagined, engaging and poetic insight into a society in transition and into lives previously obscured.’

Jokha Alharthi was born in Oman in July 1978. She is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children’s book, and three novels in Arabic. Fluent in English, she completed a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh, and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She has been shortlisted for the Sahikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean, and Serbian. She lives in Oman.

Marilyn Booth was born in Boston, USA in February 1955. She holds the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from Arabic, most recently, The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, both by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud. She lives in Oxford.

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Love In The New Millennium by Can Xue 
Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen from Chinese, published by Yale University Press

A group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalises paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Love In The New Millennium traces love's many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance. The judges said: ‘Jolts the reader from the real to the surreal. A meditative experience that opens up a fever dream of contemporary Chinese writing.’

Can Xue was born in Changsha, Hunan, China in May 1953. She is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer, literary critic, and tailor. Xue began writing in 1983 and published her first short-story in 1985. She has written novels, novellas, and works of literary criticism about the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Regarded as one of the most experimental writers in the world by some literary scholars and readers, her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She lives in Buffalo, NY, USA. 

Annelise Finegan Wasmoen was born in Philadelphia, USA, in September 1981. She is Academic Director and Clinical Assistant Professor of the MS in Translation and oversees the Translation and Interpreting open enrolment programme at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts at NYU. Her translations from Chinese into English include Can Xue’s novel The Last Lover, which received the Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent and was longlisted for the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. She also has a background in academic and textbook publishing. Annelise is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where she completed a Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies, and she holds a B.A. in Literature from Yale University. She lives in Buffalo, NY, USA. 

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The Years by Annie Ernaux 
Translated by Alison Strayer from French, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising, and news headlines. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for ever-proliferating objects are given voice. The author’s voice continually dissolves and re-emerges as Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. The judges said: ‘An elegant portrait of an age; a much needed riposte to the ever-narrowing trajectory of auto-fiction.’

Annie Ernaux was born in Seine-Maritime, France, in September 1940. She grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught in secondary schools. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. She lives in Paris, France. 

Alison Strayer was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, in July 1958. A writer and translator, her work has been shortlisted twice for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation. She has also been shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and the Prix Littéraire France-Québec, and longlisted for the Albertine Prize. Her translation of The Years was awarded the 2018 French-American Translation Prize in the non-fiction category. She lives in Paris, France. 

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At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong 
Translated by Sora Kim-Russell from Korean, published by Scribe

Park Minwoo is, by every measure, a success story. Born into poverty in a miserable neighbourhood in Seoul, he has ridden the wave of development in a rapidly modernising society. The successful director of a large architectural firm, when his company is investigated for corruption he is forced to reconsider his role in the transformation of his country. At the same time, he receives an unexpected message from an old friend, Cha Soona, a woman whom he had once loved, and then betrayed. As memories return unbidden, Minwoo recalls a world he thought had been left behind ― a world he now understands that he has helped to destroy. The judges said: ‘A delicately drawn, vividly peopled and deftly plotted exploration of profound shifts in Korean society.’

Hwang Sok-yong was born in Changchun, China in January 1943. In 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorised trip to North Korea to promote artistic exchange between the two Koreas. He was released five years later on a special pardon by the new president. He has been shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger and was awarded the Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for At Dusk. His novels and short stories are published in North and South Korea, Japan, China, France, Germany, and the United States. He lives in Seoul, South Korea.

Sora Kim-Russell was born in Florida, USA, in March 1976. She is a poet and translator, and teaches at Ewha Women's University. She lives in Seoul.

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Jokes for the Gunman by Mazen Maarouf 
Translated by Jonathan Wright from Arabic, published by Granta, Portobello Books

A brilliant collection of fictions in the vein of Roald Dahl, Etgar Keret and Amy Hempel. These are stories of what the world looks like from a child's pure, but sometimes vengeful or muddled, perspective. These are stories of life in a war zone, life peppered by surreal mistakes, tragic accidents and painful encounters. These are stories of fantasist matadors, lost limbs and voyeuristic dwarfs. This is a collection about sex, death and the all-important skill of making life into a joke. These are unexpected stories by a very fresh voice. These stories are unforgettable. The judges said: ‘A beautifully textured and absurdist gaze on human inventiveness and defiance in the midst of war’s traumas.’

Mazen Maarouf was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in January 1978. He is a Palestinian-Icelandic writer, poet, translator and journalist. He has published three poetry collections and two shortstory collections. He currently lives between Reykjavik and Beirut.

Jonathan Wright was born in Andover, UK, in December 1953. He is a British journalist and literary translator.  He joined Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. He has served as Reuters' Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. From 1998 to 2003, he was based in Washington, DC, covering U.S. foreign policy for Reuters. For two years until the autumn of 2011 Wright was editor of the Arab Media & Society Journal, published by the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo. He lives in London.

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Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli 
Translated by Sam Taylor from Frenchm published by Granta, Portobello Books

A narrator remembers the harsh winter of 1919, fighting in the Russian Civil War on the Romanian front.  Setting up camp in a forest, he and his three closest friends from the battalion discover a pond which becomes a secret place for the four young men to smoke, rest, wash and talk. Four Soldiers is about those precious months of waiting for spring to come, for their battalion to move on and for the inevitable resumption of war and its horror. It is a short, beautiful novel about friendship and the fragments of happiness that illuminate the darkness. The judges said: ‘An oblique, deceptively simple evocation of friendship and resilience in the Russian Civil War, which builds to a haunting tribute to lives carelessly cast aside.’ 

Hubert Mingarelli was born in Mont-Saint-Martin in Lorraine, France, in January 1956. He is the author of numerous novels, short-story collections and fiction for young adults. In 2003, Four

Soldiers won the Prix Médicis. His novel A Meal in Winter was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He lives in Grenoble.

Sam Taylor was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in August 1970. He is a translator, novelist and journalist, and began his career as a journalist with The Observer. His translated works include Laurent Binet's award-winning novel HHhH and Leila Slimani's Lullaby. His own novels have been translated into ten languages. He lives in Texas.

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The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann 
Translated by Jen Calleja from German, published by Profile Books, Serpent's Tail

When Gilbert Silvester, a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film, awakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately, irrationally, inexplicably - for Japan. In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert's directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima. Falling into step with another pilgrim - a young Japanese student called Yosa, clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide - Gilbert travels across Basho's disappearing Japan with Yosa, one in search of his perfect ending and the other the new beginning that will give his life meaning. The Pine Islands is a serene, playful, profoundly moving story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way. The judges said, ‘A quirky, unpredictable and darkly comic confrontation with mortality.’

Marion Poschmann was born in Essen, Germany, in December 1969. A prize-winning poet and novelist, she has won both of Germany's premier poetry prizes, has been shortlisted for the German Book Prize on three occasions and won the 2013 Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. She lives in Berlin.

Jen Calleja was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, UK, in December 1986. She is a writer, musician and literary translator from German. She has translated works by authors including Wim Wenders, Michelle Steinbeck, Kerstin Hensel and Gregor Hens, and her translations have been featured in The New Yorker and The White Review. She was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library and writes a column on literature in translation for the Brixton Review of Books. Her debut poetry collection Serious Justice (2016) is published by Test Centre. She lives in London.

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Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin 
Translated by Megan McDowell from Spanish, published by Oneworld

The crunch of a bird’s wing. Abandoned by the roadside, newlywed brides scream with rage as they’re caught in the headlights of a passing car. A cloud of butterflies, so beautiful it smothers. Unearthly and unexpected, Mouthful of Birds is a collection of stories that burrow their way into the psyche with the feel of a sleepless night. Every shadow and bump in the dark takes on huge implications, leaving the pulse racing; blurring the line between the real and the strange. The judges said, ‘Spritely and uncanny, this is a beautifully imagined and skilfully executed collection of short stories.’

Samanta Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 1978. She is the author of three story collections that have now been translated into 20 languages. The recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. She lives in Berlin.

Megan McDowell was born in Mississippi, USA, in October 1978. She has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Paris Review. She received the 2013 PEN Award for Writing in Translation. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

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The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg 
Translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner from Swedish, published by Quercus, MacLehose Press

In April 1988, Valerie Solanas - the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol - was discovered dead in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was only 52; alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. In The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg revisits the hotel room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood, where she was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather, and the mental hospitals where she was interned. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a powerful, heartbreaking voice to the writer of the infamous SCUM Manifesto. The judges said, ‘An acute exploration of the imminent possibility of tragedy in all our lives - performative, exhilarating, searing.’

Sara Stridsberg was born in Solna, Sweden, in August 1972. She is a writer and playwright. Her second novel, The Faculty of Dreams, won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and her novels have four times been shortlisted for Sweden’s August Prize. The Gravity of Love – Ode to My Family, has been sold in 15 languages and was the 2015 Swedish winner of the European Prize for Literature. She lives in Stockholm.

Deborah Bragan-Turner was born in Middlesborough, UK in February 1953. She translates Swedish literature, particularly literary fiction and biographies. She has a degree in Scandinavian languages from the University College London. She lives in Faversham, UK.

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Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk 
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones from Polish, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in a remote village in south-west Poland where Janina Dusezjko, an eccentric woman in her 60s, describes the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are subsequently found murdered, she becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead offers thought-provoking ideas on perceptions of madness, social injustice against people who are marginalised, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, and belief in predestination.  The judges said, ‘An idiosyncratic and bleakly humorous indictment of humanity’s casual corruption of the natural world.’

Olga Tokarczuk was born in Julechon, Poland, in January 1962. One of Poland’s best and most beloved authors, her novel Flights won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. In 2015 she received the Brueckepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as Poland’s highest literary honour, the Nike and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2009 for Flights. She is the author of nine novels, three short-story collections and has been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Wroclaw, Poland.  

Antonia Lloyd-Jones was born in Oxford in March 1962. She translates from Polish, and is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. She lives in London.

***

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez 

Translated by Anne McLean from Spanish, published by Quercus, MacLehose Press

Whilst pacing the dark and lonely corridors of a hospital in Bogotá during the premature birth of his twin daughters, Juan Gabriel Vásquez befriends a kindly physician, Doctor Benavides. Through the doctor, Vásquez meets Carlos Carballo. A middle-aged man, Carballo is consumed by a conspiracy theory about the assassination of an up and coming politician and JFK-like figure Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. He tries to persuade Vásquez to write a novel about the murder, but despite repeated refusals Vásquez is drawn deeper into the conspiracy when Gaitán’s vertebrae, stored in a glass jar in a mutual friend’s house, goes missing. Sparking a turn of events, Varquez opens up a second, even darker conspiracy about the assassination of another politician, Rafael Uribe Uribe, in 1914.   The judges said, ‘A harrowing immersion into the bottomless pit of conspiracy theories. Rooted in Colombian history, it speaks to a central question of our times.’

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in January 1973. He is the author of four previous novels, The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations, as well as the story collection The All Saints' Day Lovers. He is the winner of many prizes including the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Sound of Things Falling (jointly with his translator Anne McLean), the 2013 Gregor von Rezzori Prize and the 2011 Alfaguara Prize. He has translated works into Spanish and his own work has beentranslated into more than 20 languages. He lives in Bogotá. 

Anne McLean was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in November 1962.  She has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, stories, memoirs and other writings by many authors including Hector Abad, Javier Cercas, Julio Cortazar and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice, for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas (2004) and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero (2009). In 2012 she was awarded the Spanish Cross of the Order of Civil Merit. She lives in Toronto.

***

The Death of Murat Idrissi by Tommy Wieringa 
Translated by Sam Garrett from Dutch,  published by Scribe, UK

Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision. They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and saviour, they embrace his offer. He extracts them from a tight space, only to lead them inexorably into an even tighter one: and from this far darker space there is no exit. Their tale of confinement and escape is as old as the landscapes and cultures so vividly depicted in this story of where Europe and Africa come closest to meeting, even if they never quite touch.

Tommy Wieringa was born in the Netherlands in May 1967. He grew up partly in the Netherlands, and partly in the tropics. He began his writing career with travel stories and journalism, and is the author of four other novels. His fiction has been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford/Weidenfeld Prize, and has won Holland’s Libris Literature Prize. He lives in the Netherlands.

Sam Garrett was born in Harrisburg, USA, in September 1956. He has translated some 40 novels and works of non-fiction. He has won prizes and appeared on the shortlists of some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. He is also the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch–English translation. He lives in Amsterdam.

***

The Remainder vy Alia Trabucco Zerán 
Translated by Sophie Hughes from Spanish, published by And Other Stories

Santiago, Chile. The city is covered in ash. Three children of ex-militants are facing a past they can neither remember nor forget. Felipe sees dead bodies on park benches, counting them up in an obsessive quest to square the figures with the official death toll. He is searching for the perfect zero, a life with no remainder. Iquela and Paloma are also searching for a way to live on. When the body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, the three take a hearse and a handful of pills up the cordillera for a road trip with a difference. Intense, intelligent, and extraordinarily sensitive to the shape and weight of words, this remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of generational trauma.  The judges said, ‘A lyrical evocation of Chile’s lost generation, trying ever more desperately to escape their parents’ political shadow.’

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Santiago, Chile in August 1983. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University and holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from University College London. The Remainder is her debut novel. It won the Best Unpublished Literary Work awarded by the Chilean Council for the Arts in 2014, and on publication was chosen by El País as one of its top 10 debuts of 2015. She lives in London.

 Sophie Hughes was born in Chertsey, UK, in June 1986. She has translated novels by several contemporary Latin American and Spanish authors, including Best Translated Book Award 2017 finalist Laia Jufresa’s Umami. Her translations, reviews and essays have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Times Literary Supplement. She has been the recipient of a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship and residency, a PEN Heim Literary Translation grant, and in 2018 she was shortlisted for an Arts Foundation 25th Anniversary Fellowship. She lives in Birmingham.

report by Susannah Tarbush, London
based on press release from FourCommunications.com  

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'A New Divan - a lyrical dialogue between East and West' to be launched at British Library with an evening of poetry and music

May 17, 2019, 1:44 am

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PRESS RELEASE

British Library, 96 Euston Road, St Pancras, London NW1 2DB, 23 May, 7pm

‘The Poet and Suleika: a West-Eastern Dialogue in Poetry and Music’

with
 Nujoom Alghanem, Paul Farley and Don Paterson reading poetry from A New Divan 
and

Simon Wallfisch singing Hafiz and Goethe Lieder


Gingko will mark the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of the first publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan with two new books: A New Divan – A lyrical dialogue between East & West and a new annotated translation of the complete West-Eastern Divan, including Goethe’s original ‘Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding’. Both volumes will be launched at a series of public events, starting with an evening at the British Library on 23 May at 19:00 - 20:30.

‘This reimagining of Goethe’s seminal work gives us the opportunity to re-engage with his thoughts – a much needed exercise, given the state of the world today.’ – Daniel Barenboim (from his Foreword to A New Divan)

‘The West-Eastern Divan represents nothing less than a decisive reconfiguration of German, an indeed European, poetry.’ – Eric Ormsby (from his Introduction to West-Eastern Divan)

In 1814 Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer. The book was a revelation. He called Hafiz his twin and was immediately inspired to create a Divan of his own. Not long afterwards Goethe met Marianne von Willemer, with whom he rapidly fell in love. She became Suleika to his Hatem and the conversation begun with Hafiz blossomed also into a duet for two lovers, which became the Suleika Nameh (the ‘Book of Suleika’), the most beautiful part of Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (published in 1819). At the centre of the Book of Suleika are at least five poems, which Goethe published as his own but were in fact composed by his young lover Marianne von Willemer; it is these poems that were set to music by Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn.

In this anniversary year Gingko want to redress this appropriation and move the historical and the poetic Suleika firmly into the centre of our celebration of our West-Eastern dialogue in poetry and music. ‘The Poet and Suleika’ is the first of a series of events and will feature three prominent participants in A New Divan – A lyrical dialogue between East & West: Don Paterson is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary poets, writers and musicians; the Emirati poet and filmmaker Nujoom Alghanem wrote a modern version of the love duet between Suleika and Hatem; while Paul Farley produced the English version of the Raoul Schrott’s poem ‘suleika spricht’. This lyrical dialogue between East and West will be matched by a musical one, with Hafiz poems, set to music by 20^th century German composers Gottfried von Einem, Viktor Ullmann and Richard Strauss, and Goethe Lieder sung by Simon Wallfisch accompanied by Craig White.

‘The poem was his ode to friendship and symbolised the union between old and young, man and woman, human and the Divine, literature and scholarship, East and West – a union which in his mind was inseparable.’ – Barbara Schwepcke (about Goethe’s poem ‘Gingko Biloba’, Book of Suleika, West-Eastern Divan)

‘Poetry thrives and develops by cross-fertilisation.’ – Bill Swainson (from his Editor’s Note to A New Divan)

·  More information about both publications and the accompanying tour can be found at https://www.gingko.org.uk/new-divan/

·  For press enquiries or more information please contact Clare Roberts: clare@gingkolibrary.com/ 0203 637 9730

·  To book tickets for the first event at the British Library on the evening of 23 May please go to https://www.bl.uk/events/the-poet-and-suleika-a-west-eastern-dialogue-in-poetry-and-music

West-Eastern Divan

Translated and annotated by Eric Ormsby

Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan was a very personal attempt to broaden the horizons of European readers by entering into a lyrical yet scholarly dialogue with the Other. From the time of the Persian Wars, the Orient had been seen as alien, as a threat to the West; a threat that was central to the formation of Western identity. This new prose translation by the poet and scholar, Eric Ormsby, includes for the first time a complete translation of the poet’s remarkable prose commentary on the Islamic world (‘Notes and Essays For A Better Understanding . . .’). With this bilingual edition Gingko hopes not only to make a significant contribution to the study of this quintessential German poet, but also, at a time of renewed western unease about the Other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.

Publication date: September 2019 · ISBN: 978-1-909942-24-0

A New Divan

A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West

Edited by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson

A New Divan is an ambitious anthology bringing together new poems by twenty-four leading poets – twelve from the ‘East’ and twelve from the ‘West’ – in a truly international poetic dialogue inspired by the culture of the Other. The poets come from across the East (from Morocco to Turkey, Syria to Afghanistan) and from across the West (from Germany to the USA, Estonia to Brazil). The new poems respond to the titles of the twelve books

of Goethe’s original Divan, including ‘The Tyrant’, ‘Suleika’, ‘Love’, ‘Paradise’ and ‘Ill-Humour’, and draw on the distinctive poetic forms of the cultures of the poets taking part. Twenty-two English-language poets have been com- missioned to create English versions of the poems not originally written in English, either by direct translation or by working with a literal translation. Three pairs of essays in English enhance and complement the poems, mirroring Goethe’s original notes and commentary, which he called ‘Notes and Essays For A Better Understanding . . .’.

Publication date: June 2019 · ISBN: 978-1-909942-28-8

                                                            Forewords by

                                        Daniel Barenboim and Mariam C. Said

                                                                        POETS    

Adonis                                                     The Poet                   Khaled Mattawa       

Khaled Mattawa       

Abbas Beydoun                                         Hafiz                        Bill Manhire

Durs Grünbein                                                                          Matthew Sweeney

Iman Mersal                                             Love                         Elaine Feinstein

Homero Aridjis                                                                         Kathleen Jamie

Amjad Nasser                                           Ill-Humour               Fady Joudah

Don Paterson           

Reza Mohammadi                                     Reflections                 Nick Laird

Antonella Anedda                                                                     Jamie McKendrick

Fatemeh Shams                                         Proverbs                  Dick Davis

Gilles Ortlieb                                                                            Sean O’Brien

Mourid Barghouti                                      The Tyrant George Szirtes

Jaan Kaplinski                                                                          Sasha Dugdale

Nujoom al-Ghanem                                   Suleika                     Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Raoul Schrott                                                                            Paul Farley

Mohammed Bennis                                   The Cup-Bearer        Sinéad Morrissey

Aleš Šteger                                                                               Brian Henry

Gonca Özmen                                           Parables                  Jo Shapcott

Angélica Freitas                                                                        Tara Bergin

Hafez Mousavi                                          Faith                        Daisy Fried

Clara Janés                                                                               Lavinia Greenlaw

Fadhil Al-Azzawi                                      Paradise                  Jorie Graham

Jan Wagner                                                                               Robin Robertson

                                                                       ESSAYISTS

Sibylle Wentker                                                                        Rajmohan Gandhi

Robyn Creswell                                                                        Narguess Farzad

Stefan Weidner                                                                         Kadhim J. Hassan

Gingko promotes and facilitates dialogue between the Middle East and the Western world through conferences, events and publications. Its aim is to enable constructive, informed and open discussion, giving a voice to a new generation of thinkers and opinion formers. A New Divan extends this conversation into the realm of poetry.

Dr Barbara Schwepcke is the founder of Gingko as well as the chair of its board of trustees. After receiving her doctorate from the London School of Economics she worked as a publisher of Prospect magazine. In 2003 she founded Haus Publishing.

Bill Swainson is a freelance editor and literary consultant. Since 1976 he has worked for leading literary publishers, including John Calder Publishers, Allison & Busby, Harvill Press and Bloomsbury, where he was Senior Commissioning Editor for fifteen years. In 2015 he was awarded an OBE for services to literary translation.

Obituary of Libyan fiction writer, playwright and journalist Ahmed Fagih

May 27, 2019, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Two Arabic titles among recipients of latest batch of English PEN's translation awards

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Remembering Libyan writer Ahmed Fagih: b. 28 December 1942 d.28 April 2019 

by Susannah Tarbush London

The death of the Libyan writer Ahmed Fagih in a Cairo hospital at the age of 76 has deprived the Arab literary scene of a major and prolific figure whose work won recognition in his native Libya and far beyond.

Born in 1962 in the small oasis town of MIzda in the Nafusa mountains, south of Tripoli, Fagih pursued his literary ambitions from his teenage years. In a 60-year career he was variously a journalist, columnist, short story writer, essayist, novelist, dramatist, scholar, TV personality and diplomat.

Fagih never left his Mizda roots behind. On the contrary, his writing was often inspired by his intimate knowledge of rural life and by traditions of fable and folk tales. He was concerned with the animal kingdom and with man’s relationship with animals and the environment.

Fagih was a master of both the short story and novel forms. His writing tackled with humanity and humour many themes of relevance to Libyan society: the legacy of the brutal Italian colonisation, urbanisation, social justice, the impact of oil wealth, tradition vs modernity, and the oppression of women. He pushed boundaries, in for example writing explicitly about sex.

His output was so prodigious that it was hard to keep a full tally. He told the Bookanista webzinein 2015: “I have written 22 novels and 22 books of short stories, 40 short and long plays, as well as 20 or so books of essays.” Even when seriously ill last year he continued his work routine and told me in an email from Cairo last September that he was “writing away on my bits and pieces and published this year five books in Arabic.” His works were translated into many languages, including Chinese (he was twice invited to China for academic events on his work). 

Fagih’s many friends, readers and colleagues around the world now mourn the passing of a warm, original and highly talented character with an irrepressible sense of humour. There was something refreshingly unpretentious and down to earth about him.

Since his death many tributes have appeared in the mainstream and social media. The American scholar and former diplomat Ethan Chorin, author of Translating Libya: In Search of the Libyan Short Story, tweeted: “Extremely saddened by the passing of Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim al Fagih - the inimitable Libyan-Arab short story writer, novelist and playwright. His work was a big part of my introduction to Libya in the early 2000s. He will be sorely missed. Farewell, my friend.”

The Libyan lawyer and short story writer Azza Kamel Maghur (whose short story “The Bicycle” appeared in Banipal 40: Libyan Fiction) ended her eloquent obituary with: “Faghih remained young in his heart, tender with his grandchildren, respectful with women and  their  status,  a lover of his homeland, suffering from its pain, and a loving man to his family.”

Azza is from a younger generation of Libyan writers who were encouraged and influenced by Fagih. She is the daughter of the lawyer and fiction writer Kamel Hassan Maghur whose work was championed by Fagih in his writing and PhD thesis on the Libyan short story.

Fagih will be missed by his many friends in London, which was to him a home from home. He had lived in the UK for two periods in the 1970s and 1980s and submitted his doctorate to Edinburgh University in 1983.  

Fagih visited London as often as he could. He loved to host mini-literary salons in cafés, with a succession of friends and acquaintances dropping by. He was particularly fond of the famous Whiteleys department-store-turned-shopping-mall in Queensway, a busy thoroughfare in “Arab London” where Arab émigrés, intellectuals, tourists and refugees congregate. For some years Fagih was a patron of the café in a large open space at the middle of Whiteleys ground floor. When that closed down he migrated to the Costa coffee shop on the corner of Whiteleys whose big windows allow one to see the world pass by.

After his return to Cairo last year from Tunis, where he had sought medical treatment, Fagih emailed that he was “practising my life almost as normal, my daily session in Costa reading and writing.”  The Cairo branch of Costa was “wider and more elegant and more friendly than the one in Whiteleys. It’s not far from where I live, with glass walls that overlook a large and modern street in Muhandisien area, in the middle of Cairo.”

English translation of Faagih's novel Valley of Ashes (Kegan Paul International) 

Fagih was supportive of Banipal from its founding in London in 1998. An excerpt from his novel Valley of Ashes appeared in issue three and a lengthy interview, conducted by Banipal’s co-founder and then editor Margaret Obank, was published in the fourth issue, Spring 1999, under the headline “Ahmed Fagih: A writer at night”. Fagih explained that Arab authors often have to write at night because they cannot live from their writing alone and have to be otherwise employed during the day. “Naguib Mahfouz, for instance, was never a fully-time writer until he retired. He was a government employee from the ‘30s until he retired.” 

In the interview Fagih described how at the age of 14 he left Mizda for Tripoli “which was a larger community, a place where I could find the books I wanted to read, there was theatre, music, shows films. There I was meeting people – a little older than me – who had already started writing and I took part in that literary world.”

He started writing and by the age of 17 had a regular newspaper column. He went to Egypt on a scholarship when he was nearly 19. “That put me in contact with so many Arab writers and the literary society. There I really set out on my literary career”.

Fagih’s talent as a fiction writer was recognised early when in 1965, aged 22, he won the first prize in a Higher Council for Literature and Art literary competition with his first collection of short stories The Sea Has Run Dry.

In 1968 Fagih travelled to the UK to continue his education. Like other Arabs of his generation, he had been traumatised by the Arab humiliation in the 1967 war and he wanted a change of scene. He attended a tutorial college in the southern coastal town of Brighton and then studied drama for two years at the New Era Academy of Drama and Music in London. Among the stage roles he played were those of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Othello.

After the 1969 revolution that toppled King Idris and brought Gaddafi to power Fagih returned to Libya. He would over the years hold various positions, including serving as director of the Institute of Music and Drama. He told Banipal “I wrote a musical, ‘Hind and Mansour’, while I was there so that the students, male and female, could work and perform together.”

At one time he was head of Arts and Literature at the Ministry of Information and Culture.  He founded the Union of Libyan Writers and was for a time its secretary general. And he was appointed as editor of The Cultural Weekly.  He wrote for many newspapers and spent four years working in Morocco.

In 1977 Fagih returned to Britain to do a PhD at Edinburgh University, but he put his studies on hold when he was appointed head of the press department at the Libyan Embassy (“People’s Bureau”) in London. For four years I was a diplomat,” he told Banipal.  It was only after this that he had time to study full time at Edinburgh University for his doctorate.

During his time in the UK “a group of us formed what we called the Arab Cultural Trust. We put on a cultural season, produced a magazine called Azure”. Fagih was editor-in-chief of this English-language glossy magazine, published first as a quarterly and then twice yearly. There were in all 14 issues before publication ceased in 1983.

Libyan Stories: Twelve Short Stories from Libya (Keegan Paul International)

Azure covered a spectrum of Arab arts, from fiction, art and theatre to civilisation and antiquities. It was an example of the way in which Fagih was a dynamic pioneer in bringing Libyan and Arab culture to the UK. At the time there was little translation of Arab literature into English. Azure published in translation stories by Libyan and other Arab authors. All the stories in the anthology Libyan Stories: Twelve Short Stories from Libya (Kegan Paul International, 2000) edited by Fagih, as well as his introduction, were first published in Azure.  The stories include Fagih’s “The Last Station”, Kamel Maghur’s “Crying”, Ali Almisrati’s “Mussolini’s Nail”, Ibrahim el Koni’s “She and the Dogs” and Khalifa Takbali’s “Dignity”.

The renowned Arabic translator Denys Johnson-Davies was among those involved with Azure. In his book Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature Johnson-Davies recalls translating and publishing in Azurepart of an early novel by Lebanese author Elias Khoury. 

Among the contributors to Azure was the English poet, critic and editor Anthony Thwaite who had been a university teacher at the Benghazi campus of the University of Libya in 1965-67 (his acclaimed book The Deserts of Hesperides: An Experience of Libya was published in 1969 by Secker & Warburg.). 

Other contributors included the journalist and writer Peter Mansfield, the Young Liberal campaigner for Palestinian and gay rights Louis Eakes. critic and publisher Timothy O’Keeffe and Arab writers and critics such as Sabry Hafez.

Alongside editing Azure, Fagih was making headway in the drama field. In 1982 his two-act play Gazelles was performed at London’s Shaw Theatre in an adaptation by the English poet, novelist and playwright Adrian Mitchell. The staging was part of a Libyan cultural season arranged by the Union of Libyan Writers and Artists.

Fagih first made his name as a writer of short stories: his novels such as Valley of Ashes came later. One of his most famous works, the trilogy of novels I Shall Offer Another City, These Are the Borders of My Kingdom and A Tunnel Lit by One Woman was published in 1991. The following year the trilogy won Lebanon’s premier literary award. The trilogy appears in 16^th place on the Arab Writers Union list of 100 best Arabic novels.

The English version of the trilogy was published by Quartet in London in 1995, as Gardens of the Night, in translation by Russell Harris, Amin al-Ayouti and Suraya Allam. The trilogy traces the fortunes of a Libyan academic, Dr Khalil Al-Imam, from his days at Edinburgh University preparing a doctorate on The Thousand and One Nights, through a psychotic breakdown in which he embarks on hallucinatory journey in an Arabian Nights-type setting, to his obsessive love for a woman in modern-day Libya. 

Fagih’s presence in English translation took another significant step forward in 2000 when London publisher Kegan Paul International produced simultaneously five books he had written or edited. The books were launched at an event with a panel discussion at the much-missed Kufa Gallery near Queensway, in those days a centre of Arab culture. In addition to Libyan Stories: Twelve Short Stories from Libya the books were the novel Valley of Ashes; two volumes of his short stories, Who’s Afraid of Agatha Christie and Other Stories and Charles, Diana and Me and Other Stories, and Gazelles and Other Plays.

In 2011 Quartet published the English translation of Fagih’s novel Homeless Rats. The Arabic original of the novel had started life as a serial in a Libyan journal before being published in Arabic in 2000 as Fi’ran bila Juhur. The novel tells of a titanic struggle in the Libyan desert between humans in a caravan from Mizda and the hopping rats known as jerboas as they compete over scanty food sources during a drought.

Ahmed Fagih in Costa Cafe, Whiteleys, London with a copy of Homeless Rats

The translation of Homeless Rats happened to be publishing during the Libyan revolution. The book’s desert battles, alliances, war crimes, emergency meetings, tribalism and waves of refugees resonated strangely with the battles raging at that time in Libya. No translator’s name appears in the book, which was competently edited by the young novelist and travel writer Anna Stothard.

A landmark was reached in the publication of Libyan literature in English in translation when Banipal 40: Libyan Fiction appeared in spring 2011. Coincidentally the issue was published just as the Libyan uprising was erupting. In an essay on the Libyan Novel in the issue the Libyan short story writer and literary editor Ibrahim Ahmidan writes that Fagih “opened the way for the Libyan novel to make a genuine contribution to the revitalisation of the Arabic novel through his own distinctive contribution, first with his trilogy of novels (published in English as Gardens of the Night) and more recently with his unique literary experiment Maps of the Soul.”

Banipal 40 included Fagih’s vividly-realized short story “Lobsters” subtitled “In praise of lobsters and in mockery of men” translated by Maia Tabet. The darkly comic story was inspired by a true incident from the life of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in which Sartre took the hallucinogenic drug mescaline and suffered persistent hallucinations of crabs. which triggered a nervous breakdown.

Fagih’s most ambitious literary project, intended as his masterwork, was the 12-volume cycle of novels Maps of the Soul published in 2009 by Darf in Libya and al-Kayyal in Lebanon. Fagih saw this series as a Libyan counterpart to the famous 12-novel sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time by English novelist Anthony Powell.

In 2014 Darf Publishsers published the first three novels - Bread of the City, Sinful Pleasures and Naked Runs the Soul - in a bumper volume of 656 pages under the title Maps of the Soul.  The preparation of the English text was very much a team effort with the initial translation by Soraya Allam and Brian Loo revised and edited by Ghazi Gheblawi and Graeme Estry.

The first three novels of Maps of the Soul trace the life of Othman al-Sheikh, driven from his desert village by a sexual scandal in which he is fact innocent.  In Italian-occupied Tripoli Othman takes every opportunity to climb the ladder, using his charm and wits.

Fagih told the Tanjara blog that he envisaged the 12 books as four trilogies “which deal with the life and soul of Othman through its ups and downs”. One striking feature of the first trilogy is that it uses the second person “you”throughout.  Fagih noted that over the 12 books he used a variety of viewpoints including “third person, first person, second person, and the all knowing god-like authority”.

One of the most significant recent contribution sin recent years  to the body of Libyan literature in English translation is Ethan Chorin’s book Translating Libya, first published by Saqi in 2008 and republished by Darf Publishers in 2015, updated and expanded in light of the changes brought by the Libyan revolution.

In his introduction to the first edition Chorin explained that the idea for the book came after he arrived in Libya and asked his assistant Basem Tulti is he could recommend any good local authors. Tulti produced a paperback containing Fagih’s story “The Locusts” (“Al-Jarad”) which Chorin loved and translated to English.

The first edition of the book consisted of 16 stories, newly translated by Chorin (in three cases jointly with Tulti), combined with Chorin’s accounts of his travels around Libya and his search for stories. It was a highly enjoyable mixture of travelogue, scholarly study and personal encounters.

second edition of Translating Libya 

For the revised second edition, Chorin invited Fagih to write a foreword. Chorin describes meeting Fagih for the first time, in a Cairo hotel in 2012. “Fagih was more or less as I imagined him from his writing, and the occasional dust cover photo: a strong personality, witty and humane with an artist’s appreciation for the absurd.”

In his introduction Fagih wrote: “Translating Libya is an expression of Libyan culture, but also a lesson in how writers communicate in a repressive regime, where heavy censorship and random, severe punishments are common. The stories reflect society, past and present.” One story was added for the second edition: Azza Kamel Maghur’s “The Olive Tree”.

Over the decades, in tandem with his writing career, Fagih continued his life as a diplomat and in the 2000s was Libyan ambassador to Greece and then Romania. While ambassador to Romania he performed his one-man show “A Portrait of a Writer Who Wrote Nothing” at the 2009 Sibiu International Theatre Festival.  He dreamed of one day performing this who on a stage in London.

At the time of the 17 February 201 Libyan revolution Fagih was serving as part of the Libyan delegation to the Arab League. In the early days of the uprising the delegation denounced Gaddafi and Fagih defected to the rebel government.  Thereafter he wrote many articles and columns condemning Gaddafi and his regime.

Fagih told Bookanista’s Freddie Reynolds in an interview to mark the 2015 publication of the second edition of Translating Libya: “Now the country is liberated from the chains of dictatorship, and that should be reflected in the soul of every creative writer and artist. We all regret the aftermath of the revolution, yet there was a sense of relief at the ousting of the rule of terror, combined with a sense of achievement at being able to defeat it. As a writer, I felt like a long-distance swimmer who was restricted to swim in a little pond and suddenly saw that the ocean is open for him.

“As for Libyan literature as whole, and how it is affected by these developments, it is perhaps too early to judge. But the new era should open new avenues for writers, and will definitely result in a prosperous literary movement in the near future.”

Fagih’s final book to be translated into English was the unexpected Lady Hayatt’s Husbands and other erotic tales, published by Quartet in 2016. The slender volume contains seven stories by Fagih plus a story from One Thousand and One Nights. The red cover of the book is an illustration by the English illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98). Beardsley’s distinctive erotic illustrations and decorative elements, influenced by Japanese woodcuts, are scattered throughout the book.

Last August Ahmed emailed me to say he was suffering from the serious lung condition pulmonary fibrosis. He had tried to come to London to see the doctors at the London Clinic who had first diagnosed his condition but the British had refused him a visa, despite his two periods spent living in the UK and his frequent visits there.

He asked me if I could find out information on possible new treatments for his disease. He wrote: “Somebody says ‘sharks are attacking fibrosis’ meaning that a medicine is taken from the fat of sharks. One can entertain himself with such news in order to absorb and take in the shock till he gets used to the illness. Some sort of psychological trick.”

There was some irony in the thought that a shark might come to the rescue of someone whose writing had been so intimately linked with the animal world. Alas, although there is indeed research in Australia research on using substances found in sharks’ blood to treat pulmonary fibrosis, trials are only in their early stages.

Fagih was understandably frustrated and hurt by the refusal of the UK to give him a visa for medical purposes and he pleaded with the UK to reconsider. The Libyan authorities contacted the British embassy in Tripoli on his behalf and the Secretary General -designate of the Arab-European Center of Human Rights and International Law, Dr. Ramadan Benzeer, publicly urged the British authorities to grant Fagih a visa, but all was in vain.  

Fagih’s literary legacy will endure. Much of his vast body of writing in Arabic has yet to be translated, or retranslated, into English. For example, it is an open question whether any of the nine as yet untranslated novels of his 12-volume Maps of the Soul will eventually appear in the English translation.

Fagih’s works will continue to be an important source of information on Libya. The other day I happened to pick up a copy of the newly-published novel TheFourth Shore by the prizewinning British author Virginia Baily. The novel is centred around the Italian colonisation of Libya. Baily lists numerous sources in the acknowledgements section including just two novels by Libyans - one of which is Maps of the Soul. 

Two Arabic titles among recipients of latest batch of English PEN's translation awards

June 13, 2019, 10:47 am

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English PEN announces PEN Translates award-winning titles

The awards go to books from sixteen countries, in eleven languages including Arabic. 

Books from sixteen countries and eleven languages make up the latest round of PEN Translates award winners. They include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories and children’s literature and – for the first time – translations from the Burmese, Vietnamese and Romanian.

The two titles translated from Arabic are God 99 by Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright, due out from Comma Press in January 2020 and Minor Detail by Palestinian-German author Adania Shibli, translated f by Elisabeth Jaquette, to be published by. Fitzcarraldo Editions in May 2020. 

Jonathan Wright (L) and Hassan Blasim in 2012 

Will Forrester, Translation and International Manager, English PEN, said:

"These awards go to seventeen books of outstanding merit and courage. In a moment where the movement of art and ideas across borders is being challenged, translation is a vital corrective. We are thrilled that PEN Translates continues to contribute to literary accessibility and internationalism, and to ensure translators are paid properly for their work. We’re excited that the UK public will get to read these important books."

Sarah Ardizzone, Co-chair of the English PEN Writers in Translation Committee, said:

"The depth of field for these PEN Translates awards is breathtaking – from a hard-hitting memoir by a young Rohingya man, to a poignant children’s illustrated work from Slovenia, via a zany exposé of colonised language in a Belarusian novel. We’re proud to be supporting outstanding literary fiction from across Latin America, as well as China, Vietnam, Palestine, Iraq and Romania; together with poetry from Haiti, Cuba and Romania, and short story collections from Malaysia and Myanmar. Dynamic and innovative models for international publishing are especially to be saluted, in a list that is proactively both global and local."

Books are selected for PEN Translates awards on the basis of outstanding literary quality, strength of the publishing project, and contribution to literary diversity in the UK. The award-winning books are featured on the English PEN World Bookshelf website, in partnership with Foyles.

PEN Translates award winners:

 

Alinarka’s Children by Alhierd Bacharevic, translated from Belarusian by Jim Dingley. Scotland Street Press, June 2019. Country of origin: Belarus.

God 99 by Hassan Blasim, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright. Comma Press, January 2020. Country of origin: Iraq.

Crossroads and Lampposts by Trần Dần, translated from Vietnamese by David Payne. Oneworld Books, September 2020. Country of origin: Vietnam.

Exodus by Benjamin Fondane, translated from French by Henry King and Andrew Rubens. Carcanet Press, Autumn 2019. Country of origin: Romania.

Chaophony by Franketienne, translated from French by Andres Naffis-Sahely. Carcanet Press, Autumn 2019. Country of origin: Haiti.

First They Erased Our Names: A Rohingya Speaks by Habiburahman and Sophie Ansel, translated from  French by Andrea Reece. Scribe, August 2019. Country of origin: Australia/Myanmar.

Lake Like A Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, translated from  Chinese by Natascha Bruce. Granta Books, January 2010. Country of origin: Malaysia.

A Little Body Are Many Parts by Legna Rodriguez Iglesias, translated from Spanish by Abigail Parry and Serafina Vick. The Poetry Translation Centre, October 2019. Country of origin: Cuba.

Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. Charco Press, January 2020. Country of origin: Chile.

Felix and His Suitcase by Dunja Jogan, translated from Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell. Tiny Owl, May 2020. Country of origin: Slovenia.

The Past Is an Imperfect Tense by Bernardo Kucinski, translated from Portuguese by Tom Gatehouse. Latin American Bureau, November 2019. Country of origin: Brazil.

Loop by Brenda Lozano, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott. Charco Press, November 2019. Country of origin: Mexico.

Holiday Heart by Margarita Garcia Robayo, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Coombe. Charco Press, May 2020. Country of origin: Colombia.

The Town with the Acacia Tree by Mihail Sebastian, translated from Romanian by Gabi Reigh. Aurora Metro, September 2019. Country of origin: Romania.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. Fitzcarraldo Editions, May 2020. Country of origin: Germany/Palestine.

Yezet by various, translated from the Burmese by Alfred Birnbaum. Strangers Press, November 2019. Country of origin: Myanmar.

Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas. Chatto & Windus, February 2020. Country of origin: China.

 :

English PEN's Writers in Translation programme has been promoting literature in translation since 2005. Overseen by a dedicated committee of literary professionals, the programme includes a dynamic portfolio of activities, which includes translation grants, events, and PEN Transmissions, an online magazine of international writing.

English PEN's major publisher grants programme, PEN Translates, awards grants to UK publishers for translation costs and is supported by Arts Council England. Together with the PEN Promotes programme (supported by Bloomberg) over 300 books in translation have been supported by English PEN grants since 2005.

English PEN, a registered charity, promotes the freedom to write and the freedom to read in the UK and around the world. The founding centre of a worldwide writers' association, established in 1921, we work to identify and dismantle barriers between writers and readers, whether these are cultural, political, linguistic or economic. In 2011 English PEN was awarded the highest funding increase in the literature sector by Arts Council England to develop literature in translation.

first-ever anthology of Palestinian science fiction to be launched at British Library

September 12, 2019, 10:29 am

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Tomorrow evening at 19.00 the British Library in London is to host an event that should warm the hearts of lovers of Palestine literature and of science fiction alike – ‘Palestine 2048: Science Fiction and the Future Past’ . The event marks the London launch of Palestine + 100: Stories from a century after the Nakba (Comma Press), said to be the first ever anthology of SF from Palestine.

The British Library describes the event as “an evening of  Palestinian futurism celebrating the power of Science Fiction to shed new light on historical events and contemporary politics in the Middle East.”

Manchester-based Comma Press published the book with assistance from Arts Council England and with an award from English Pen’s ‘PEN Translates’ programme. Six of the 12 stories were translated from Arabic, each by a different translator; the others were written in English.

At the  launch Comma’s founder and editorial manager Ra Page and the anthology’s editor Basma Ghalayini will chair a panel including two contributors to the book: British-Palestinian novelist Selma Dabbagh, author of Out of It, and Palestinian-Hungarian poet, journalist and novelist Anwar Hamed, author of eight Arabic novels.  Hamed’s novel Jaffa Makes the Morning Coffee was longlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF).  

Selma Dabbagh

Ghalayini was born in Khan Younis, Gaza, and spent her childhood in the UK until the age of five before returning to Gaza. She has worked in various finance roles in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors, and is also an Arabic translator and interpreter. She translated short fiction from Arabic for the KFW Stifflung series Beirut Short Stories, and for Comma projects including Banthology and The Book of Cairo (edited by Raph Cormack).

The 12 Palestinian authors commissioned to write stories for the anthology have risen to the challenge of producing SF stories set in 2048 with zest, imagination and ingenuity. Some had written SF previously; for others it was a new field of writing. Of course, this raises the perennial question of what distinguishes SF from the closely related genres of speculative fiction, magic realism, fantasy, surrealism, ghost stories and so on.

The  Nakba is the 1948 'catastrophe' in which more than 700,000 Palestinians – some 80 per cent of the total –were expelled from Palestine during the establishing of Israel. Ghalayini writes in her insightful introduction to the anthology that the Nakba did not end in 1948. “Since then, countless Israeli government policies have furthered this gradual ethnic cleansing." The ‘ongoing Nakba’ is “continually evolving. We are forever entering new stages of it…”

The anthology is dedicated to the memory of Tom Hurndall, the British photography student who was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in April 2003, dying in the UK in January 2004 without regaining consciousness.

The stories in Palestine + 100 extrapolate from the often bizarre and disturbing reality in which Palestinians live today: advanced Israeli weapons, surveillance, cyber warfare, drones, separation walls, increasing pollution and attempts to stifle or wipe out history. To judge by the stories, the Palestinian predicament lends itself well to SF,and  perhaps increasingly so. There has always been something surreal and fantastical about the Palestinians' history in the 20th and 21st centuries - for example in the condition of being "present absentees".

Basma Ghalayini

As Ghalayini points out SF “uses the future as a blank canvas on which to project concerns that occupy society right now The real future - the actual future – is unknowable. But for SF writers, the mere idea of ‘things to come’ is licence to re-imagine, re-configure, and re-interrogate the present.” 

However, she observes that the SF genre “has never been particularly popular among Palestinian authors; it is a luxury, to which Palestinians haven’t felt they can afford to escape. The cruel present (and the traumatic past) have too firm a grip on Palestinian writers’ imaginations for fanciful ventures into possible futures.”

She suggests that another reason SF has not been popular among Palestinian writers is that it doesn’t offer an obvious fit with the Palestinian situation. “In classic SF, the battle lines are drawn quickly and simply: the moral opposition between a typical SF protagonist and the dystopia or enemy he finds himself confronting is a diametric one.

"But in Palestinian fiction, the idea of an ‘enemy’ is largely absent. Israelis hardly ever feature as individuals, and when they do they are rarely portrayed as out and  out villains.” She cites as an example Ghassan Kanafani's novel Returning to Haifa.

Anwar Hamed 

Anwar Hamed’s tale “The Key”, translated by Andrew Leber,  is told from the perspective of Israelis anxious about the rusty old keys Palestinians in refugee camps retain from the homes in Palestine they were forced to leave.  "My grandfather feared those photographs of people holding keys more then any arms deal being signed by neighbouring countries" says the main character of the story. His grandfather had developed the  idea of a transparent "gravity wall" to keep out those without the right 'code'. But now, on the centenary of Israel's establishment, ghostly presences are making themselves felt through the sounds of keys turning in locks. 

Selma Dabbagh's savvy and hilarious story "Sleep it Off, Doctor Schott" tells of a suspected emotional relationship between two middle-aged scientists, Gaza-born Professor Mona Kamal and her co-worker, Tel Aviv born Dr Eyal Schott, who are being spied on by young Layla in her capacity as a "Recorder". The scientists work in the privileged 'Secular Scientific Enclave'. Professor Kamal had been a hero to Layla as a girl growing up in a refugee camp, for her creation of  a "bot army" that burst through the borders in 2032. The story is written in the form of dialogue, and one could imagine it making an entertaining radio play. 

Saleem Haddad 

The anthology's opening story is Saleem Haddad’s poignant“Song of the Birds”. Haddad gained international recognition with his debut novel Guapa, which has a gay central character. It won The 2017 Polari Prize and was awarded a Stonewall honour.  "Song of the Birds" was written  in memory of Mohannad Younis a  Gazan writer and pharmacy postgraduate who killed himself in August 2017 at the age of 22. Younis was seen as a symbolic of the wave of young Gazans killing themselves over the hopelessness of their situation.

The main character of the story is 14-year-old Aya whose beloved brother Ziad killed himself the previous year.  Ziad starts to appear to her in dreams, and she keeps having visions of war, destruction and ruined buildings. When she is swimming in the sea it suddenly becomes full of "bottles, soiled tissue paper, plastic bags and  rotting animal carcasses". It is all a total contrast to her actual Gaza City neighbourhood with "its wide leafy streets, exquisite limestone buildings, quaint cafes and vintage furniture shops".  Ziad reveals to her that the horrific visions she has been experiencing are the  "real Palestine" and that what she ha been living in is in fact a simulation. "They've harnessed our collective memory, creating a digital image of Palestine. And that's where you live."  While the older generation spend a lot of time asleep, "it is up to us to develop new forms of resistance."

Like Haddad, Mazen Maarouf has a growing international profile, with his  short story collection Jokes for the Gunmen (Granta Books), translated by Jonathan Wright, longlisted earlier this year for the International Booker Prize.  Maarouf’s story "The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid", translated by Wright, is at 43 pages by far the longest story in Palestine +100. 

Mazen Maarouf 

The complex story portrays a dystopia  in which the Palestinians had all been forced southwards  and were no longer called Palestinians but Falasta. In 2037 a hitherto untested biological warfare munition was launched, programmed to identify and kill the Falastis and within three weeks there was no Falasti left  except for the narrator of the story. 

The narrator says: “I’ve always wanted to be a superhero. I didn’t want to save the world, or even save all the children of Falasta. I just wanted to save my sister when they came to steal her imagination.” The stolen imaginations of Palestinian children are gathered into a satellite named the Dabraya Star. Being the last Palestinian the narrator is confined within a glass cube and transported on a motor bike by Ze’ev, whom he had fist met in an orphanage. “Every week we go to a primary school in a kibbutz or a town we haven’t visited before. Ze’ev puts me on display in front of the schoolkids in the playground for half an hour. None of them have ever seen a Palestinian before.”

In her story "Commonplace" Gaza-based Rawan Yagh conjures up a ghastly cityscape. Adam, a dealer in sedative drugs, known euphemistically as "grapes", lives in an area constantly under attack by swarms of drones from over the wall. The drones plant explosive devices on roofs, destroying whole buildings. Adam has been traumatised by the death of his quirky sister Rahaf. after she was attacked by a drone. The story sees him embarking on a desperate mission.

Questions of memory and history echo through  the anthology. In Samir El-Youssef's story "The Association", translated by Raph Cormack, there has been a 2028 Agreement under which “the people of the country – all the different sects and religions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish – had decided that forgetting was the best way to live in peace. The study of the past is forbidden.” In 2048  an eager young journalist investigates the assassination of a Palestinian history professor.  Those who oppose the Agreement and seek to investigate and record the past are regarded as extremists: they are said to have dozens of different groups such as the Jidar "who harboured evidence of the effects of the near 20-year blockade of Gaza." . It appears that the Professor's views on Palestinian history may be connected to his murder.

Abdalmuti Maqboul plays with time in his searing story "Personal Hero", translated by Yasmine Seale. Time runs in reverse, bodies arise from graveyards, and the great Palestinian was hero Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni comes back to life one hundred years after his death in battle on 8 April 1948. The story is skilfully unfolded towards an unexpected ending.

In "Vengeance" Tasnim Abutabikh combines environmental concerns with a story of revenge for a historical wrong involving land sales in Palestine. Carbon dioxide levels are rising and global temperatures have soared. In rich countries people live in air-filtered biospheres but in poorer areas such as Gaza people have to wear lifemasks with filtering systems, just a flick of a switch away from death.

The classic SF trope of a monster landing from outer space appears in Talal Abu Shawish's "Final Warning"in translation by Mohamed Ghalaieny.  The creature lands in Ramallah, darkening the sky and knocking out power and communication systems. The local Christian Father, Muslim Imam and Jewish Rabbi join hands and chant to terrified crowds, with some people thinking that  Judgment Day has arrived. Eventually the creature addresses the people and warns them they have one last chance to rectify their behaviour. "Your struggles in this tiny sector of the planet's surface have, for more than a hundred of your planet's orbits, cause more tension and conflict, directly and indirectly beyond its borders than any other area of its size in the known universe... By continuing to threaten the planet's stability as  a whole, you also threaten the wider galaxy's stability... "

In “Application 39” UK-based Gazan novelist, dramatist and dance promoter Ahmed Masoud envisages a Palestine divided into independent statelets. After the collapse of the  Oslo Accord and the 2025 Israeli invasion, each major Palestinian city had been forced to declare itself an independent state. These republics are linked by a network of tunnels and lifts. From time to time the cities fought each other, but in 2030 a peace deal between the states was signed.

In 2040 mischief makers Ismael and Rayyan, young friends in the Republic of Gaza, carry out a hoax they call “Operation Application 39”, in which they submit an application from the Republic to host the  39th Summer Olympic Games in 2048, forging the President of the Republic's signature.  The hoax is uncovered after the IOC writes an enthusiastic letter of acceptance to the president, saying to hold the Olympics in the Republic of Gazawould seal the peace deal of 2030. But a woman official of the Republic warns Ismael and Rayyan that this "could lead to another war here...with Khan Younis, or Rafah, or even Ramallah." Nor will Israel be happy, and it might start a bombing campaign, leading to a regional war. Masoud fully develops the potential of this scenario in a lively narrative.

Majd Kayyal 

Majd Kayyal was born in Haifa to a displaced family from the village of Birwa. His first novel The Tragedy of Mr Matar (El Ahlia 2016) won the  Qattan Young Writer of the Year Award, and his first collection of short stories Death in Haifa came out this year. In his compelling story "N" translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes  Kayyal creates two separate worlds existing simultaneously, one Palestinian, the other Israeli.

The story focuses on a father, who lives in the Palestinian world, and his son "N". There has been a peace Agreement between the two sides under which only those  born after the Agreement, such as "N", are allowed to travel between the two worlds. The father watches a PhotonTransit system which conveys his son back to Israel and  produces "a spectacular flash of light. It's unlike any other light I've seen, a light we don't know the source or path of, which swallows our children to over there, to the other there."

The story references Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s film The Time that Remains. “Father and son fishing at night under military surveillance. I grew to love that dialogue,” muses the father. "N" returns with his partner Nada to live in the Palestinian world “I don’t know if all the Palestinians who stayed in the Israeli world maintained their identity like this, but this Nada, she’s very special," the father thinks. "You can see a profound sadness in her that hasn’t healed.”

The Cairo-based academic, journalist and translator Emad El-Din Aysha was born in the UK to a Palestinian father from the Akka region. He is an avid fan of  history and SF, and has published fiction and essays on Arab and Muslim SF. His humorous story "Digital Nation" is set as Israel's centenary Independence Day approaches. 

The Palestinians “hadn’t had a single state to govern for a long time. Instead they made do with a series of banana republics. Literally, they grew bananas on the slopes of Ramallah – as well as mangos in Judea and pineapples in Samaria.”

The protagonist of story,  the ageing Asa Shomer, is Director of the Israeli security service. Shabak. He faces a security crisis in that a highly sophisticated hacker Shabak has nicknamed Hannibal is "destabilising the stock market, hijacking media outlets, hacking servers... these are all issues of national security," an aide tells Shomer. 

Old-fashioned Shomer is nostalgic for “good old fashioned-terrorism” rather than cybercrime.
“But who could believe an Arab would be capable of such ingenuity: a vision of a united Palestinian State, simmed so perfectly and in such detail, then virus-leaked into every VR console on the Israeli market…”  He is alarmed by the Palestinian Utopia portrayed by the hack: "Hope was contagious." and "who needed to 'liberate' Palestine if you could convert Israel into Palestine?"The virus spreads and spreads, right up to Israel's Independence Day.

The publication of Palestine + 100  follows Comma Press's first anthology of  specially commissioned Arab SF  - the acclaimed  Iraq + 100: stories from a century after the invasion edited by Hassan Blasim and published in 2016. Comma has been making a major contribution to the translation and publication of Arabic literature, particularly short stories. It's newest collection of short stories from Palestine is The Sea Clock & Other Stories by Gazan author Nayrouz Qarmout ,winner of a  'PEN Translates' award. Comma is - most deservedly - currently shortlisted for the Arab British Centre Award for Culture, with the winner due to be announced on 26 September.   

interview with the Lebanese-British poet Omar Sabbagh

December 7, 2019, 1:54 am

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Interview with the Lebanese-British poet, author, critic and academic Omar Sabbagh to mark the publication - by Wales-based publisher Cinnamon Press - of his fifth poetry collection But It was an Important Failure. Sabbagh lives in the United Arab Emirates where he is Associate Professor of English at the American University in Dubai (AUD). 

How do you see this fifth collection,  compared with the preceding four collections, in the trajectory of your output?

It’s in the main a confessional and lyrical artefact, like all my preceding collections – barring the one collection which was an absolute failure down to my own loss of perspective at the time.  However, like my first, My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint, and my fourth, To The Middle of Love, I do think this collection is me, with the caveats below in mind, at closer to my better (rather than best), on the whole anyway.  As per the highly ironic opening and closing prose entries of this 5^thcollection, while in many ways parodic (which is not by any means to say, comic, somehow) in some of this verse, I am in this collection as bare as I’ve ever been.  And I would say that I think this collection hangs-together as a collection in the most effective way among my poetry books.  Nearly all the verse was written very swiftly, and usually on impulse; however, that doesn’t mean I invoke some romanticist notion of sudden, overwhelming ‘inspiration.’  It merely means that due to certain psychological fears that remain with me, in some subliminal way I don’t tend to invest as much time in writing verse as perhaps a poet should, or a better poet would.  This is primarily because I see the stakes as particularly high in poetry, and would rather avert losing in that artistic game; that said, when I do succeed, as I feel I may have done in over half this collection, I think the time spent means very little.  In those places, as it were, the brain was following the mind, or vice versa.    

How did you decide on the title, which plays with the line "But for him it was not an important failure" from W H Auden’s poem "Musée des Beaux Arts"?

Well, the collection being in the main confessional and lyrical, and the life in the living for an individual in today’s world, like me at least, meaning in the main suffering, it seemed like a propitious play for the title.  Also, failure is important to me.  It is more than just the gauge of success; it is in some significant way success, when that failure is the right kind of failure, an ‘important’ one so to speak.  I don’t need to invoke (very) late Beckett, to indicate how artistic endeavours are above all else like the soul itself, processual, more than to do with some final end-product.  I suppose the process of trying, essaying verse is itself the verse for me: as I suggest, too, in the closing ironies of my 5^th, ‘My Practice of Poetry, or, Not Bad’.  All this means that poetry is indeed a part of my behaviour, and not part of some tale I feel that really needs telling.  That said, there may come a day in the near or farther future when I begin to write verse about things beyond my-self! 

Your fourth collection To The Middle of Love was dedicated to your parents and to Faten, now your wife and mother of little baby Alia. What impact have marriage and fatherhood had on your poetry? Some of your particularly beautiful tender poems are for Faten or your daughter.

Yes, true.  Even if I’m not quite, or don’t quite consider myself a truly responsible poet, I am I think a responsive one.  And relationships of tenderness are the quickest spurs for my pen.  Alia and Faten are like my wings, a twinned and colourful surprise.

Is your foreword to this new collection, "A Pretentious Man", a witty rebuke or riposte to certain critics? Yusuf pops up again -  Yusuf Ghaleez whom we remember from your first novella Via Negativa? The foreword throws names around, eg “… what Hegel would have dubbed, probably in Findlay’s translation, ‘looking-on’…” And you observe: “However, though he was often seen as a pretentious man, he knew himself to be merely pompous.”

Well, it’s a comic response to myself as a critic of that same self.  Findlay wrote prefatory material, but didn’t as far as I’m aware (at least not in my Oxford translated editions) translate Hegel.  That was a little red herring to amplify the comedy there.  Throwing names around is kind of the point.  I do it often, but most often when I really do know the name’s works well.  However, I can see how others might be sceptical; hence, I took this prose piece as an occasion in a way, if not to answer actual critics, necessarily, the ones who populate the air, potential critics or others perhaps with lambasting concerns.  Yusuf is a name I often use.  Father of Jesus in the Christian mythos; and also a name I think Kafka uses.

Omar Sabbagh with his 2nd novella Minutes from the Miracle City (Fairlight Moderns, 2019) 

The collection ends with your essay ‘My Practice of Poetry, Or, Not Bad’. Is your head for ever bubbling with poetry waiting to come out or do you have arid spells? Does what comes out as you write sometimes surprise or baffle you? Do you write by hand, or straight onto a screen? Do you feel sometimes the poetry comes almost too easily?

Yes, the poetry does come too easily, which is why I don’t, as yet at least, consider myself a responsible poet.  I write, normally at will, and always onto a screen (this is my one thoroughgoing concession to modern technology, along with a few other things, like email).  Because I write so much, and at will, no, I rarely surprise myself.  What is often missing in my verse, because my ‘will’ is quite a logical one, is what Wallace Stevens called the element of the ‘irrational.’  But sometimes I get this, and when I do, logic and reflection (which in part may define my approach to verse, in the main) meet and are surprised by successful lines on occasion.  In other words, it’s not so much that ‘poetry’ comes too easily, but words (and thoughts) do.  Poetry comes rarely to me, but when it does, if not ‘easy’, it is swift.

Dubai and Lebanon (also Egypt & England) are very much presences in your poems, and Dubai is the setting of your recent 2nd novellaMinutes from the Miracle City – could you sum up the importance of place to you?  And also say something on your experience of teaching at AUD and  before that at the American University of Beirut (AUB)?  

One of the first major influences on my reading (and thus, writing) life was Lawrence Durrell, and for him the spirit of place is key.  This is not as powerful a concern for me (I’m not Lawrence Durrell, as yet at least), but I do feel like personae and places can and do interact in seamless, palpable and fruitful ways.  And apart from issues of prose style and more attitudinal concerns like voice, character is for me the root of my love for and my love in trying at least to build my own narratives.  Teaching, in Beirut and Dubai, so far, has been as it would be anywhere, at times a joy, at others a drain.  However, I should say that my teaching has influenced and informed some of my prose publications.  In particular I have made use of insights gained while teaching fiction or poetry in some of my papers, and the loci of universities have figured centrally in some of my most successful fiction: not only my Beirut novella, Via Negativa: a Parable of Exile (Liquorice Fish, 2016), but also such prize-winning fictions of mine as ‘Dye’ (later in Cinnamon Press’s Ruins and Other Stories) or ‘Bad Faith’ (in Cinnamon’s first The Cinnamon Review of Short Fiction); or, as another instance, my piece of creative nonfiction, ‘From Bourbon to Scotch: Extracts from a Dubai Diary’, which was published some years ago in the Routledge journal, POEM.

A reviewer of your previous collection (RoulaMaria Dib, writing in the Oxford Culture Review) noted its various references to digging – in tribute to Seamus Heaney - this is continued in your new collection with “On Digging”, dedicated to your father. You pay tribute to various named figures in your poems and their dedications; are they kind of father figures and mentors?

Yes, father figures in craft and in life loom large for me.  In fact, I was recently re-reading in and about Lacan’s Seminar XX, which deals with female sexuality and knowledge, among other things.  And as ever, I used this recent bout of re-reading to garner a new batch of inferences.  I think I like to lend myself authority in my writing – whether it’s by the use of capitalised initials at the starts of my lines in my poetry, or an authoritative voice, using at times well-nigh heroic syntax, or stagey punctuation in my prose.  And all of these features of my mental life, reflected directly in my writerly, are ways of me searching for the law(s).  I am both, I like to think anyway, highly gifted at abstract thinking or ratiocination, and to boot, my father, the best dad in the world, probably loved me, now as then, too much.  In other words, coded, I am like Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’ and like most narcissistic types, both too much myself and too little.  And so on.  Theodor Adorno, one of my favourite twentieth century philosophical writers (in translation) cashes out in a serial manner this kind of psychological phenomenon in one of his aphorisms, ‘Hothouse Plant’, in what is my favourite of his works (in translation), Minima Moralia.  In fact, to recoup, this last aphorism was used as an epigraph at the start of my first collection of poetry from 2010, My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint (Cinnamon Press).

You often use colour words in your poetry and fiction –“emerald eyes” being a recurring motif. I remember reading in one of your group emails how the poem "For Vincent" in But It was an Important Failure was  triggered by seeing the Schnabel film on Van Gogh, Do you have painterly vivid imagination? Like some people have with colour and music, a kind of synaesthesia.

I’m not sure I suffer or prosper from synaesthesia, but I do have a deeply-embedded relationship with words.  And this reaches between and through their representative content and their materiality; both the way they denote and connote, but I think anyway, in ways that synergise.  Colours are examples of this, where they seem to be to me (and seam to be) both abstract and concrete.  I would say or guess that as well as being quite good at descriptive writing, and from the inception of my writerly attempts, I also have (and without any detailed or deep knowledge of music) a quite musical imagination, and that, in many dovetailing senses.

Do you think a reader of your poems need to be well versed in English literature so as to get all the allusions? Or is it enough that they may be carried away by the language, images and rhythms?

Only the latter, yes.  Especially in my verse, which is far less sophisticated than my prose.

Your two novellas were well received. You are now working on a novel entitled “The Cedar Never Dies” (which is also the title of one of your earlier poems). Could you say something about this, and about the current upheavals in Lebanon, which have inspired some of your most recent poetry? 

The plot of this projected novel, as per the already worked-up synopsis, embodies by the end the notion of ‘at-one-ment’.  Both in its use of a Christian mythos, married in signal ways to other presiding religious affiliations in Lebanon, and in the way it hopes to enact a kind of Lebanese solidarity of sorts by its close, in some respects very different to the current events in Lebanon, but in some, strangely, uncannily, serendipitously relevant.  Indeed, the novel was conceived and work was begun this past spring, much before the onset of contemporary Lebanese events in autumn of 2019.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Plenty of things.  But you’ll have to send me more questions at another time!

Interview conducted via email by Susannah Tarbush, London