New Fiction in Translation: Two Stories by Yasmeen Hanoosh
Yasmeen Hanoosh’s forthcoming short-story collection أطفال الجنة المنكوبة (Children of an Afflicted Paradise) was one of our “30 Reads: A Month of Iraqi Women Writers.”
One short story from that collection appeared in the Fall 2021 FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, and another is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
Levi Thompson has translated two more stories from the collection. We share them here:
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Yasmeen Hanoosh is Iraqi-born fiction writer, literary translator, and professor of Arabic literature at Portland State University. Yasmeen is the author of the monograph The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2019), and the short story collection Ardh al-Khayrat al-Mal’unah (The Land of Cursed Riches, Al-Ahliyyah Press, 2021). Her second collection, Atfal al-Jannah al-Mankubah (Children of Afflicted Paradise) has been translated and excerpted in English, Spanish, and Italian. Yasmeen’s English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including World Literature Today, Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, and The Iowa Review. Her translation Closing His Eyes (Abbas), received the NEA translation fellowship (2010). Her translation of Scattered Crumbs (al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize (2002) and has been since excerpted in a number of publications and anthologized in Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations (2006).
Levi Thompson is Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focuses on modernist literary developments outside of Europe. Levi’s first book, Re-orienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry, will appear with Cambridge University Press. He has published translations of poetry from Arabic and Persian with UT Austin’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies publications program, Inventory, Transference, Jadaliyya, and ArabLit Quarterly.