NOVEMBER 4, 2023 — Last week, the Denver Quarterly announced their annual prizes, and this year’s Cole Swenson Prize for Translation went to Fatima J. Alharthi for her translation of Najwa Binshatwan’s “Hussein […]
“When the central government announced a plan to rebuild what the war had devastated, the municipality put forth a request to establish a sea. Unlike other requests, which usually lingered in a state of neglect, tucked away in drawers, the central government responded right away, as they didn’t have any drawers in their offices in which to hide such paperwork.”
The twelve authors from nine countries who recommended books for our list of 2023 summer reads had different ideas about what you need in a summer book.
“Iman is afraid that she’s going to lose her job to AI. I pray to God that it will be like the rest of the inventions, which came to the Arab world only after they’d grown old in their own worlds.”
This story, from Najwa Binshatwan’s acclaimed 2019 collection, An Ongoing Coincidence, won the ArabLit Story Prize that same year in Sawad Hussain’s translation. We re-run it this year as part of Women in Translation Month.
Later this month, UEA Publishing Project will release Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic, an anthology of short fiction by Arabophone writers from the African diaspora, edited by Garen Torikian and translated by Sawad Hussain and Nariman Youssef.
Herodotus had been around since 400 BC.
During the Benghazi bombings, he made a run for it.
Includes the perfect hot-and-sweet late-summer story from Muhammad al-Hajj, in pitch-perfect translation by Yasmine Zohdi.
“Often, readers tell me I should write about one subject or another, and I don’t like this sort of relationship, where readers approach the writer as though they’re a machine or a mythical creature.”
