Bushra al-Maqtari’s ‘What Have You Left Behind’ Longlisted for 2023 Moore Prize For Human Rights Writing
The Christopher G. Moore Foundation today announced the 14-book longlist for its 2023 prize for human rights writing.
The Christopher G. Moore Foundation today announced the 14-book longlist for its 2023 prize for human rights writing.
This excerpt from Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind is a companion to our discussion with translator Sawad Hussain: “On Translating Trauma, and What To Do After Reading About Yemen.”
When the book went out for review, a number of reviewers got in contact with me saying what can we do after we read a book like this? So I asked Bushra: “What do you want readers to do?”
This month, we can look forward to new non-fiction, poetry, and novels in translation.
The 2018 book, al-Maqtari said in an interview with al-Madaniya, was an attempt to “resist death through writing”; she added: “It was a simple attempt to document the narrative of the war and its dark memory based on those affected by it. It contains the memories of victims, whose suffering the warring parties insist on deepening and exploiting, and shows how all of the parties in the conflict, in the end, are murderers.”
What Have You Left Behind?, by the author-translator duo Bushra Al-Maqtari and Sawad Hussain, is among eighteen projects in thirteen languages to have won a Fall 2021 PEN Translates Award.
Books are selected for PEN Translates awards on the basis of “outstanding literary quality, the strength of the publishing project, and their contribution to UK bibliodiversity.”