Yet Iraqi literature continues, somehow, to blossom. There are older writers Fadhil al-Azzawi and Muhammad Khudayyir still at work (although the former in exile), and much younger ones, too: Thirtysomething Iraqi Hassan Blassim has been called “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive.”
NEA translation grants were announced yesterday ($300,000 worth) and I was pleased to see the stories of Luay Hamza Abbas on the to-be-translated list. I talked about his stories in May after two of them appeared in Banipal 37.
There are two stories by Luay Hamza Abbas in Banipal 37: Iraqi Authors, “The Pictures” and “Ali the Red,” and I think they’re well worth discussing. The prose—translated by the […]
