In the last five years, there has been a surge of interest in Syrian writing in German translation. In this series of interviews, writers, poets, publishers, and artists in Berlin talk about their experience with the publishing industry in Germany and beyond.
“Poetry brought a certain degree of cultural legitimacy to politicians, who simultaneously cultivated the support of prominent poets and feared the repercussions of their failure to do so.”
“All those who are knowledgeable about Arabic children’s literature became that way through personal effort, seeking out books here and there, following people (authors, publishers, book influencers) on social media, and buying books at their own expense.”
“I also believe writing should be accessible. This era needs a kind of writing that can reach the new generation, connect with their emotional lives, and encourage them to enjoy reading. That calls for clear, simple writing which draws its subjects, its metaphors, and its aesthetic from today’s language and imagination.”
“He was an all-round writer with a strong social conscience, and after seeing how he reflected on society and its ills through the indirect allegorical lens of fiction I thought it would be interesting to see how he addressed the issues that concerned him through the more direct medium of a regular newspaper column.”
“I have been thinking of bringing Arabic adab (أدب) and Chinese wen (文) together in a comparative project and look at the ways in which the very value of the humanities today–that educated individuals are more than the money they make and the goods and services they produce; rather, it is about the problems they help solve and the way in which they interact with the wider world—has always been an integral part of thought and action in human history.”
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea in my head. Other times I ravage entire books looking for the spark of a joke. I have read more widely on the subject of medieval Baghdad this spring and summer than I have since grad school, and this has been time very well spent.”
“I’m very interested in the manipulation of temporality — or rather, as I’ve suggested, time-space configuration — that we see in Palestinian SF across different media.”
“He was a very intellectual person, very forward thinking, sometimes too forward in his ideas. He did not really mash into the traditional Coptic orthodox conservative life.”
