Lebanon’s Raya Agency, run by Yasmina Jraissati, has had a good number of new rights sales in the recent months. Several are worth noting: There have been multiple sales for works by Syrian writers Dima Wannous and Khaled Khalifa, Lebanese novelist… Read More ›
“Eighty percent of AUC Press business was settled in one market and overnight we lost it.”
“My dream would be to expand this soon to include writers working in Arabic, too, and work collaboratively with partners and publishers in the region and beyond.”
“[O]nly 0.6% of translations of foreign works into French are from the Arabic.”
“The partnership will see both publishing companies exchange the same number of books to be published in translation each year.”
“They have amazing illustrated books. So we’re going to be launching cookbooks with them.”
“From historical epics, social satire, police procedurals and stories of the future Middle East: we will publish the exciting and the unexpected.”
The successful campaigns share a few characteristics: large networks, good explanation of where the money’s going, decent (to fabulous) perks, and a lot of hard outreach work.
I was skeptical when Darf Publishers relaunched “with a focus on Arabic literature in translation.”
A March 24 conversation on contemporary Arabic fiction — between short-story writers Hassan Blasim and Hisham Bustani, editors Jennifer Acker and John Siciliano, scholar Mohamed El Sawi Hassan, and publisher Michel Moushabeck — is now online: Although Bustani loomed over the… Read More ›
The Netherlands-based NGO Hivos recently sponsored a “Disrupt! Books!” event in Amman “dedicated…to investigating the possibilities of the internet for the traditional Arabic publishing industries[.]”
The And Other Stories Arabic Reading Group is back with three more Syrian books being considered for publication in English.
