Submissions for 2023’s edition of the Stephen Spender Prize for for poetry in translation are now open. The Stephen Spender Trust writes: Translate ANY poem from ANY language into English, and win publication and cash prizes! Language lovers and budding poets of all ages are warmly invited to take partContinue Reading

” I am not even sure that for my generation the hope of a homecoming is still realistically there. However, a novelist cannot be constrained to the limitations of reality; a novelist has to have a hole in the wall to see the light of the day; a novelist needs to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel somehow, because this is the way for the novelist to keep on writing their narratives.”Continue Reading

It’s publication day for Shalash the Iraqi’s series of posts — essays, short stories, satiric monologues, magical-realist sketches — translated to English by Luke Leafgren nearly twenty years after their first appearance online.Continue Reading

“After only a few days—let’s say less than the first week after the appearance of Shalash—he became a phenomenon that occupied public opinion. It was a terrible thing for me, to be influential in a way that I did not expect, and that I could not even imagine, in the sense that readers turned Shalash into their conscience and their exclusive voice.”Continue Reading