The Journey of Hyenas (2013) by Egyptian writer Soheir al-Musadafah, sets the a story of a woman’s seventh-century slavery against the present day:

By Aisha Khalil Nasser

Soheir al-Musadafah’s The Journey of Hyenas nests stories within stories. It sets the oral tradition — which had been transmitted over centuries through maternal lineage — inside written.

In the book, the oral transmission of  history is interrupted when the protagonist decides to write her ancestor’s story in a manuscript, also titled The Journey of Hyenas. The great grandmother, who matured through her personal journey, wanted her descendents to benefit from her life lessons. Enter Nermeen.

But Nermeen is not the author of the larger The Journey of the Hyenas. The contemporary story is narrated by her husband.

Journey in the present

Nermeen has been married to Gamal, a copy-editor, for twenty years, but she’s been unable to conceive a baby. This creates tension in their relationship, as Gamal wants to have children, while Nermeen refuses to be part of a polygamous marriage. Gamal can find no fault in his beautiful, sexy wife who is also a great cook and an excellent housewife. At first, his mental, sexual, financial, and physical abuse, which attempts to drive her to ask for a divorce, is defused by her calm demeanor.

Yet when Gamal accidentally discovers that his wife is a creative writer, he plants cameras in the house to spy on her. Upon reading her manuscript, The Journey of the Hyenas, Gamal decides to move on with his mother’s plan to marry another wife. Nermeen, who seems to have inherited some of the qualities of her great grandmother, senses her husband’s change, and pours her thoughts into a second manuscript on the withdrawal of love. Here, she points to the various ways a woman can feel that her husband has changed towards her, and Nermeen insists on the need to move on without a word said. Which she does.

At this point, both of them are off to new beginnings. Nermeen becomes an acclaimed novelist and marries a supportive literary critic. Meanwhile, Gamal marries a woman who seems the antithesis of Nermeen, or “a classic example of divine punishment,” as he puts it. With this new wife, he has two boys.

The manuscript-within-the-book

The Journey of Hyenas manuscript is set in seventh-century (first century of hijra) Arabia, and tells the story of a slave girl who was struck by a vision about the absurdity of war, and who strived throughout her life to convey her message, without much success, in a war-torn region. Deserted by her lover under the guise of noble causes, but really in pursuit of war and women, the ancestor turns into a soothsayer/healer who roams the desert for twenty years and feels the urgency to forewarn her descendents about loving men.

Sawda‘ bint al-Rumi, the ancestor-protagonist, describes herself as an ugly slave girl of African origins. However, her true love, which she meets by the end of her life, has another view: ‘Arabs habitually attribute names, which are opposite to the real essence of things.’ He then describes to Sawda‘ how beautiful she really is.

My reading

Al-Musadafah draws more than one line connecting the storytelling great-grandmother and her descendent: They are both female, both have soothsaying qualities, both are in some sense enslaved, and both live in a patriarchal society with underlying misogynistic views towards women.

While Sawda‘ is literarally a slave, Nermeen is enslaved in an abusive relationship within a society that gives men the right to subjugate women. Both Sawd‘ and Nermeen are not cherished by their men in this misogynistic context, and both find truer love late in their lives. I suggest that the novel explores the theme of patriarchal societies, which have not changed over centuries, and which are built on coercion of women, who are valued only for their reproductive functions.

In thoughts and in actions, Gamal reveals the archetypical misogyny of males in contemporary Egyptian society. Gamal’s total subjugation of his wife, and his absolute authority over her, has been undermined by her creative writing. Her creativity is especially threating to his ego because of his failed attempt to write anything that warrants reading and referencing (19). In discovering her creativity, Gamal has in a sense discovered that he is the barren one, and had to assert his potency. By nature, he thinks, she should be less intelligent than he is (51), and her writing is a disturbance of this natural order.

This disturbance is probably why Gamal moves on with his plan to marry another wife when he discovers his wife’s talent. For a woman’s place is underneath a man (39), as Gamal describes it. In aspiring to be equal to, or higher than, her man, Nermeen is jeopardizing the natural order, and has to be banished.

Luckily for Nermeen (and for Sawda‘) the “natural order” is in the minds of only some men: those who believe in macho power as the assertion of their manliness. Other men, who don’t feel threatened by a woman’s creativity, and who don’t feel the need to remove artistry from life, support her endeavors. Upon listening to her inner self and the oral history of her family, Nermeen becomes free, just like her ancestor before her. If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that we should cherish the wisdom of old women.

A note about language

The Journey of Hyenas is the third novel by Soheir al-Musadafah, who is also an accomplished poet and translator. The lucid language makes this novel a gripping read with smooth transition in spite of the narrator, Gamal, shifting between present and future.

Gamal moves back and forth between his current life with Nermeen, and their lives after the divorce, but the transitions are smooth.  The manuscript refers to historical incidents and uses classical language, and tends to be prolix at times. Nermeen also uses classical Arabic, which can be difficult to follow at time, but she masters her tools to such an extent that Gamal fails to recognize their originality, at first.

When Gamal first stumbles on part of the draft, he thinks Nermeen must have copied it off a book from the Turath. Although the manuscript is well crafted, the story could have been a shorter novella.

But, all in all, al-Musadafah’s poetic imagery supplements her theme and makes this novel an enjoyable read. The sensory suggestions and details in the novel are numerous, for example, Gamal experiences his loss as “my soul has become completely flabby, following the departure of my woman” (71). A critic who is interested in symbolism and imagery in literature would find plenty of material to work with. I read The Journey of Hyenas as a critique of the hegemonic social structure that subordinates females and enforces males’ supremacy, privileges, and prerogatives.

Aisha Khalil Nasser holds a PhD in Middle East Studies from Exeter University, and has recently completed an MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Oregon State University. Her research interest is in Cultural Studies and women in the Middle East.

Algerian novelist Assia Djebar — frequently mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender and one of the “immortals” of the Académie Française — has died in a hospital in Paris:

According to Algerian state radio, Djebar — whose given name was Fatima Zohra Imalayène — will be buried in her native Cherchell, where she was born in 1936.

Djebar wrote novels and short-story collections striking for their wide historical sense and their fiercely female focus. They included: The Thirst, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, A Sister to Scheherazade, So Vast a Prison, Algerian White, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. She also wrote poetry.

She moved to France to study at 18. There, began her life as a bearer of many “firsts” when she became the first Algerian woman to be admitted to the country’s top literary university, the Ecole Normale Superieure. She published her first book in 1957, at just twenty-one.

Dejbar, like many Algerian authors, was criticized for continuing to write in French after her nation’s independence. When wondering why Djebar hadn’t won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French paper Le Figaro suggested that the fact that she didn’t write in her “mother tongue” was one of the reasons. Although she never wrote in Arabic, she did study the language, and attempted to use French to “reproduce Arabic rhythms.”

In a 2010 interview, Djebar said that she writes “against erasure”:

In some of my earlier books (So Vast the Prison, Algerian White, etc..) memory was often the first impulse to write, or rather the sudden urgent need to record the spontaneous testimony of someone close … Because a sudden fear seized me of seeing this shard of life, this moment of real life – with its grace, or the hollow of despair in an anonymous story, yes, sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure. Most often, in this flow of a past life, of desperate or brilliant experience, illuminating, a spark, shy at first, then hardened obstinacy makes me say: “this must be fixed, this should not plunge into the night, into oblivion or colorless indifference! This need to inscribe: at least it doesn´t matter if it’s me who takes the pen, or some other suddenly arising to whom I could pass the lightning glimpse (pain, rebellion, or short joy) …

She won a number of other prestigious prizes for her writing and cinema including the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1979, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1996, sometimes called the “American Nobel,” and the Frankfurt Peace Prize in 2000.

In 2005, Assia Djebar became the first woman from the Maghreb to become an “immortal” — or life-long member of the prestigious Académie Française.

Works available online:

L’Amour, la fantasia — Excerpt of the novel in English translation

Algerian White — Excerpt of the novel in English translation

“Poems for a Happy Algeria”

“Women of Algiers in Their Apartment“

Nawal El Saadawi just finished up a popular, well-received appearance at the Emirates LitFest in Dubai:

Now, the eighty-three-year-old novelist and activist is in England for an appearance at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. It’s part of a tour, organized by Sable Litmag, which will take El Saadawi across England and Scotland. (See the schedule of events.)

El Saadawi has long been a poster-child for Arab feminism in the West. Indeed, both El Saadawi’s important work as an Egyptian feminist and the use of her work by Western feminists shed light on the difficulties translating international feminist “solidarity.”

As Amal Amireh writes in “Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World“:

“In this case study of El Saadawi’s reception, I examine both academic and nonacademic writing by and about her, foregrounding the strategies by which the first world reads and understands Arab women’s texts and drawing out their implications for issues of cross-cultural inquiry and feminist solidarity. I show that El Saadawi and her Arab feminist work are consumed by a Western audience in a context saturated by stereotypes of Arab culture and that this context of reception, to a large extent, ends up rewriting both the writer and her texts according to scripted first-world narratives about Arab women’s oppression.

This doesn’t change the important role El Saadawi has played in creating space for feminist fiction and memoir in Arabic — including feminist fiction by men, as novelist Fadi Zaghmout’s comments on her Dubai talk demonstrate. But it points to a fundamental difficulty in translating her work, which is inserted into an entirely different web of meanings.

When some Arab commentators suggest that only women’s work is being translated (it’s not) or that Arab women writers get more attention in English (nope), it points back to the way in which Arab women writers are often positioned, as freedom fighters aligned with the West. So: Is it possible to choose to read women writers, and to be interested in women’s writing, without re-writing those works to fit a particular liberationist narrative? I’d hope so.

SHORT STORIES BY WOMEN

Syrian author Rasha Abbas’s “The Gist of It,” trans. Alice Guthrie

Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh’s “God, It’s as Though You’re Sewing a Dress For a Flea,” trans. Randa Jarrar

Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s “Silence,” trans. Randa Jarrar

Tunisian author Rachida al-Charni’s “The Way to Poppy Street,” trans. Piers Amodia

POEMS BY WOMEN

Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s “Love,” trans. Khaled Mattawa

Emirati poet Nujoom al-Ghanem “She Who Resembles Herself,” trans. Khaled al-Masri

Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika “Love Song for Words,” trans. Rebecca Carol Johnson

TRANSLATIONS BY WOMEN

Mourid Barghouti’s “Sleeping Woman,” which must refer to Radwa Ashour, translated by Ashour.

An excerpt from Sinan Antoon’s Ave Maria, trans. Maia Tabet.

Also, of course:

Arab Women Writers Recommend Their Favorite Arab Women Writers

Consorts of the Caliphs — a history through the writings of thirty-nine women — is the newest Library of Arabic Literature title, officially forthcoming next month. A consciously non-canonical and collaborative effort, the book was discussed at several points during last Saturday’s LAL workshop, “A Corpus Not a Canon“:

While Consorts is a short book, just 144 pages, it was a long time in coming. The project began more than a decade ago with a smaller, pre-LAL group.

After a start, the translation languished. But it was not forgotten: When Philip Kennedy wrote the grant proposal for the LAL, a note was added about a Consorts translation. Yet it was again lost among the proliferation of projects.

Still, the idea persisted: In December 2012, several LAL editors met in Abu Dhabi, along with poet Richard Sieburth, to discuss the writings of Consorts and to talk about the collaborative and reader-focused nature of what they were attempting. Over the last few years, each of the LAL editors has contributed in some way to the project. Now, in the spring of 2015, the book is finally ready.

During his Saturday presentation, LAL Executive Editor Shawkat Toorawa said Consorts could be viewed “not exactly as a manifesto, but as a way of saying, ‘This is what we think.'”

What Team LAL thinks, according to Toorawa, can be seen in part on the book’s crowded cover. It credits Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 1276 AD) with the original composition, but also credits editing by Toorawa, translations by all the LAL editors, an introduction by Julia Bray, and a foreword by Marina Warner.

According to Toorawa, “This is how we feel about the vision, about editing, about translating, about collaboration, and about taking something otherwise little-known and making it part of a conversation.”

Riffing off the workshop’s title, Toorawa added: “Neither a corpus nor a canon.”

The many names on the cover make it clear both that there “are many ways of doing this work” and that the group feels collaboration “doesn’t devalue a text, it adds value.”

The thirteenth-century compilation was well-known in its time, according to Kennedy. But later, Joe Lowry said, it “left less of a footprint in the tradition.” The 2015 editing and translation takes these women’s voices back from a position of relative obscurity. For reasons good and bad, there will almost certainly be of interest from outside the field.

Julia Bray described the volume’s poetry as “one very period-specific kind of women’s poetry,” which “belongs to a very elaborate culture in which lots and lots of luxury objects are produced and traded.” Women slaves lived among, and were among, these luxury objects. The poems represented the “kind of things that a woman poet can produce, and is expected to produce, and does produce in a situation where she is meant to be entertaining, witty, and able to respond as a virtuoso to any situation.”

But the book is not written or compiled by any of these women. “This is a book by a historian…who wrote in many different formats, and I suppose you could say genres,” Bray said. “No doubt, as a historian, he would’ve considered this book a kind of history.”

As a historian, Ibn al-Sa’i is known to have chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, including the lives of women. In Consorts, Ibn al-Saʿi attempts to make a connection between the lives and writings of the powerful wives in his time and the lovers of Baghdad’s “Golden Age.”

“Modern historians, I think, would probably pooh-pooh it as a work of history, and I think they would be quite wrong to do so,” Bray said. “There is a certain mindset about modern historians of the Middle East which is extremely insensitive to questions of genre and mode, and thereby jettisons an awful lot of vital intellectual and cultural history.”

“Although it looks something of a trifle in terms of its number of pages, it is an…intellectual engagement with very diverse material and very diverse purposes for the writing of history.”

For those who are interested, it looks like the book is available now through the NYU Press website.

In 2006, “Vagina Monologues”-inspired projects launched in Lebanon (“Women’s Talk”), Egypt (“BuSSy”), and the Netherlands (“Veiled Monologues”). In 2012, a similar project launched in Morocco (“Dialy”), although it’s had different struggles:

According to a Guardian profile about the Moroccan project that appeared yesterday, the project has had trouble not just from the anxiety of Moroccan theatre managers, but also from representatives of Eve Ensler, the creator of the English-language “Vagina Monologues.”

According to The Guardian, the Moroccan “Dialy” has been staged twice since the beginning of 2015, once at the Studio des Arts Vivants in Casablanca and once at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris. Emmanuelle Jardonnet writes:

On both occasions there was controversy. The two organisations received threats of legal action from lawyers representing the author of the Monologues, Eve Ensler, demanding that they cancel the show. Ensler’s legal representatives alleged that the status of Dialy, quite openly inspired by the 1996 play, needed to be clarified. Initially the Moroccan show aimed to be an adaptation. In preparation the Aquarium organised a string of encounters and workshops to foster “female self-expression”, with contributions from about 150 women.

Following this a preliminary text was submitted to Ensler. As this application was not accepted, the troupe opted to use a completely new and original text by Maha Sano on the same subject.

“Heated” negotiations finally allowed the play to be performed.

More in The Guardian and Le Petit Journal.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian project, BuSSy, continues its fund-raising.

Earl of Carnarvon, who sponsored the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, was present with Howard Carter when the archaeologist first chiselled into the tomb. Carnarvon finally asked, “Can you see anything?” Carter replied with the famous words: “Yes, wonderful things!”

By Yasmine Motawy

Novelist Reem Bassiouney.

Writer-academic Yasmine Motawy recently spoke to award-winning Egyptian novelist and academic Reem Bassiouney about her novel of the same title — Ashyaa Rai’a (Wonderful Things) — published by Dar Al Adab in 2010 and set for release in English in 2016. Bassiouney has two other novels, The Pistachio Seller and Professor Hanaa, available in English translation.

Yasmine Motawy: Your books have romantic elements in them that we don’t normally find in  contemporary Arabic fiction. Why did you as a serious writer not shy away from love as a theme?

Reem Bassiouney: It’s true, now that you mention it, there is little romantic love in new books, but the characters are heavily symbolic and archetypal so the romantic relationships are not really relationships at all, they are more the interactions of individual egos with other egos around them. My characters are all deeply imperfect, which I feel stops the romances they have from feeling “romantic.”

YM: The book discusses class issues. Is this a manifesto on class?

RB: Not at all; I wanted to represent what I see as the cruelty and rigidity of the class system I see today. Gated communities of selective clubs, schools, and careers — such as diplomacy — control people’s access to spaces and make real social mobility a very tricky business, as you can see with the character of Asmaa in the book. The scene where she humiliates herself by jumping into the water to retrieve a spoiled child’s plaything is symbolic of the humiliation involved in trying to ingratiate oneself with those with power in the hope that her children can move up in the world.

In fact, all the characters represent various Egyptian “types” and their complex relationship to Egypt: the frustrated intellectual activist in the ivory tower with her superficial understanding of the problems of the underprivileged; the 1960 generation of corrupt yet conservative officials who — much like abusive spouses — love Egypt but feel that only force can ‘whip it into shape.’ There is also Asmaa, or Egypt, with her goal of a better future that she doggedly pursues with stubborn oblivion to reality, flexibility, and patient tolerance for humiliation. There is also the character who is from the professional upper middle class who wants to maintain his bubble but feels obliged to conduct tepid forays into an Egypt he loves but is afraid to know.

YM: The fantastic title of the book is not where pharaonic references end. Can you tell us more about this?

RB: The desire to build monuments that immortalize one as eternally important is a pharaonic thing, and both the reluctant architect of the mausoleum and the ‘captain’ who wants it made have a megalomania of sorts that drives the events of the story. The title of the book begs the question: “which wonderful things?” And the answer depends on who is answering.

YM: What do you think about the current state of Arabic fiction? The popular literary prizes?

RB: I think that the state of Arabic literature is moderate but definitely does not realize the potential of Egyptian writers — especially women writers, who have to work double in a highly corrupt system with close networks. It is a big challenge and clear in the number of women authors who’ve made it with no compromises.

YM: How is the reception of your work different in Arabic and in translation?

RB: The reception of my work is different because for a foreign audience the novel tells much about Egypt and Egyptians, so it is also sometimes either the first encounter or a breaker of stereotypes. For an Egyptian audience, the characters and the social factors take over.

YM: Where are you now in terms of books (book being written, published, translated)?

RB: This novel Ashyaa Rai’a (Wonderful Things) will come out March 2016 in English under the name Mortal Designs by AUC Press. I am working on a new one.

Yasmine Motawy works in the department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo and is also a scholar of children’s literature and a translator. 

In 2014, ArabLit did a very popular “Year of Reading Arab Women.” A number of readers asked for a follow-up in 2015. In January of this year, nine acclaimed Arab women writers chose favorite books by other Arab women writers:

>Recommendation from Mansoura Ezz Eldin

Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter (English version available from Interlink, trans. Sophie Bennett)

“The novel that I’ve loved the most by an Arab woman writer is Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter, which I read for the first time when the Egyptian edition was issued in 1998, and this was the first time I knew her writing. I bought it during the last two years of exams during university from a newspaper-and-bookseller who stood in front of the University of Cairo’s main gate, after its cover grabbed my attention.

“I read the first pages and couldn’t leave the book until I had finished it. Akthough I had an important exam the next day, I spent my night with the protagonist Khalil, and sympathized with him, and tried to see the world through his eyes.

“I loved the way Hoda Barakat revealed her protagonist gradually, just as I loved the images of Beirut at the center of the craziness of the game of war, and I saw in the Beirut of the Stone of Laughter any city in a similar situation.

“Even now, I still appreciate The Stone of Laughter and see it as one of Hoda Barakat’s strongest works.”

~

>Recommendation from Miral al-Tahawy

Duna Ghali’s Orbits of Loneliness (2013)

Truth is, there is a long list of Arab women’s work that I’m sure was important in the history of my reading, but what I remember is the last text I read that had a profound impact on me, and that’s Duna Ghali’s “Orbits of Loneliness,” a novel that tells about the narrator’s relationship to her young child during a time of war and siege in Iraq, both before and after the US military invasion.

The novel describes the complex relationship between a mother and her son, the loneliness and togehterness, the fears and harsh life under siege. It is a feminist novel that in incisive and bold in its psychologyical complexity, unprecedented exploration in modern Arabic literature.

More on Orbits of Loneliness:

An excerpt from the book, trans. Maia Tabet, is available on the Banipal website.

It was also one of novelist Ibrahim Farghali’s choices for his “favorites of 2013.”

>Recommendation from Iman Mersal

Hoda Barakat’s work, especially The Stone of Laughter and The Tiller of Waters, stand among my favourite works by modern Arab female writers. It’s not just the way she narrates the civil war or the madness of Beirut, but her humour, cynicism and first and foremost, her originality.

Another whose work I admire is Safinaz Kazem. When I was a young writer in my 20s, I would never have been able to admit this, as the Islamic ideology behind her work stood as a barrier between it and me. I read her 1970 Romantikeyyat, an account of her years in America as a young student, while working on my PhD dissertation on Arab Travel Narratives of America. Other female writers I read  would be filter their experiences through some ideological lense or another, as if they had left their bodies at home. Kazem’s account, on the other hand, was one of a transformative journey that made me read the entirety of her oeuvre with great relish. Likewise, there are memoirs written by some Arab female writers that deserve mention, even if one isn’t a fan of their work as a whole: Hamlat taftish: Awraq shakhsiya (1992), by Latifa Zayat, ِAwraqi…Hayati (1995), by Nawal El Saadawi, and Alaa al- Jisr (1986) by Aisha Abd al-Rahman (also known as Bint al-Shati). One feels, in these works, that the authors speak in their own voices, unfettered by the collective will or collective projects so present in their other writings.

>Recommendation from Inaam Kachachi

Rasha Al Ameer’s Judgement Day (translated into the English by Jonathan Wright)

“I consider يوم الدين, (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2002) the book of the Lebanese writer Rasha Al Ameer, the fiction that one should read.”

• “Translated into French by Youssef Seddik as Le dernier jour: confessions d’un imam, Paris: Actes Sud, 2009.
• “Translated into English by Jonathan Wright. Judgment Day: A Modern Arabic Novel, Oxford University Press, 2011.”

More on Judgment Day:

‘Judgment Day': A Conversation About Poetry, the Quran, and the Future of Arabic

Review of Rasha al-Ameer’s ‘Judgment Day,’ trans. Jonathan Wright

Q & A: On Translating Rasha al-Ameer’s ‘Judgment Day’

~

>Recommendations from Adania Shibli

Iman Mersal’s A Dark Alley Suitable for Learning to Dance and Walking As Long As Possible, as well as Samira Azzam’s The Clock and the Man.

“Books I cherish and in fact allowed me finally to appreciate Arabic poetry are two collections by Iman Mersal:

• ممر معتم يصلح لتعلم الرقص، دار شرقيات، القاهرة، طبعة أولى 1995.
• المشي أطول وقت ممكن، دار شرقيات، القاهرة، 1997.

1. الساعة والإنسان ـ المؤسسة الأهلية للطباعة ـ بيروت 1963″

A number of Mersal’s poems were collected into These Are Not Oranges, My Love, trans. Khaled Mattawa. You can read some of the poems on Blackbird. 

I don’t believe a collection of Azzam’s work has ever been translated, although her stories can be found in a few collections, such as Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women. You can also watch a short film based on the short story “The Man and the Clock.”

~

>Recommendation from Iman Humaydan

Alia Mamdouh’s The Passion 

“Alia Mamdouh was my great discovery — her book al-Wala3 (published in 1993). You cannot imagine how beautiful this book is.”

This novel is available in French translation as La Passion and Mamdouh’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning The Loved Ones is avaiable in English (trans. Marilyn Booth) and her Napthalene is available in English (trans Peter Theroux).

~

>Recommendation from Fatima Sharafeddine

The Granada Trilogy, by Radwa Ashour

Only the first part of the trilogy — named one of the top 105 books of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union — is available in English translation, by William Granara.

More on Ashour:

Beloved Egyptian Novelist Radwa Ashour, 1946-2014

‘I Would Like To Be Radwa Ashour’

Radwa Ashour and Mourid Barghouti on the Responsibilities of Writers

‘Whenever I Think of Writing…I Remember Radwa Ashour’

Barbara Romaine on Translating Radwa Ashour

~

>Recommendations from Ghada Abdel Aal

Radwa Ashour’s The Granada Trilogy and Sahar Mandour’s I’ll Draw a Star on Vienna’s Forehead.

Mandour was born in Beirut in 1977 to an Egyptian father and a Lebanese mother. She studied psychology at L’Universite Saint Joseph in Beirut and afterwards worked as a journalist.

Her first novel, I’ll Draw a Star on Vienna’s Forehead, was published in Beirut in 2007. This was followed by A Beiruti Love and 32, both of which were bestsellers at the 2009-2010 Arab Book Fair in Beirut. Her fourth novel, Mina, was about a young gay actress living in Beirut.

More from Mandour:

World Literature Today: Hayat (an excerpt from 32)

ArteEast: Excerpts from Sahar Mandour’s 32

Jadaliyya: Excerpt from 32

~

>Recommendations from Reem Bassiouney

Sahar Khalifeh, Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door and Salwa Bakr

“The Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh — her novels are all good. And the Egyptian novelist Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door. Also the short stories of Salwa Bakr.”

Khalifeh’s Door to the Courtyard is perhaps her most acclaimed work. Bab el-Saha, however, has not yet been translated into English. You can find it in German as Das Tor (Unionsverlag, 2004) and French as L’impasse de bab essaha (Flammarion, 1998).

Still, you can find at least these five novels by Khalifeh in English: Of Noble Origins (trans. Aida Bamia, AUC Press), The Inheritance (trans. by Aida Bamia, AUC Press); Wild Thorns (trans. Trevor Legassick and Elizabeth Fernea, Interlink); The End of Spring (trans. Paula Haydar, Interlink); and The Image, the Icon and the Covenant (trans. by Aida Bamia, Interlink).

Latifa Zayyat’s The Open Door is also available in translation from Marilyn Booth, and a collection of Salwa Bakr’s stories, The Wiles of Men and Other Stories was translated by Denys Johnson-Davies and published by AUC Press.

~

>Recommendation from Jana Elhassan

Lina Hoyan El Hassan’s Nazek Khanum

“Lina Hoyan El Hassan the Syrian writer, I loved her novel Nazek Khanum. It is smooth and entertaining and the main character was depicted very well.”

None of Lina Hoyan El Hassan’s (sometimes El Hosn) work has been translated into English. El Hassan was born in Syria in 1977 and studied philosophy at the University of Damascus. Her first novel, Girl of the Sun, was published in 1998, and Nazek Khanum is her most recent. She has left Syria and is currently working and writing in Beirut.

Egyptian short-story writer, novelist, and translator Ibtihal Salem died early Saturday at the age of 66:

Salem was born in Giza and study psychology at Ain Shams University. After that, she worked in theatre and radio, and her first collection of stories, The Seagull, was published in 1989. Her first novel, Blue Windows, appeared in 2000.

Books that followed included two books for children, as well as A Small Box in the Heart (2004), The Sky Doesn’t Rain Lovers (2008), and the short-story collection An Ordinary Day (2009).

Blue Windows won a “Literature of War” Prize.

Salem’s work has been translated into German, English, and Italian, and an English-language collection, Children of the Waters (2002), was translated by Marilyn Booth and published by the University of Texas Press.

She also translated several works from French into Arabic, with a focus on folk tales and stories and poems for children.

More:

Egypt’s Turbulent Waters in Ibtihal Salem’s Experimental Writings

Ibtihal Salem’s page on Arab World Books 

In what sort of language can an author write about something as banal and contested as menstruation? Should a character pee in colloquial Arabic or Modern Standard? In the first part of a two-part interview, Rachael Daum discusses urinary-tract infections, menstrual blood, and language with acclaimed Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh:

By Rachael Daum

Chreiteh accepting an award for Always Coca Cola.

Something I really admire about both of your novels so far is your head-on approach to very, shall we say, earthly matters. In Always Coca-Cola, Abeer gets her period, and in Ali the protagonist is prone to UTIs, and you write very viscerally about the flow of blood and urine, respectively. I’m interested in this, and why you chose to have your readers confront these subjects? Particularly written in fus7a [Modern Standard Arabic]?

First of all, it is the source of a lot a lot of frustration for me — that is, I am really frustrated with the way that women are regulated in social and literary space. Women are always there as an erotic body, depicted in sexual ways, and naturally the issue of female desire is a big problem. There are of course female authors who write about female desire, and that’s great. But oftentimes women’s bodies are either sexualized or given a sort of sanctity, or both, and this sanctity is harmful. We, as Lebanese women, and I think as women in general, have to hide these things [such as periods and urination], we have to be ashamed of these things. The reality is that we deal with these things on a daily basis, and we need to explore them. I wanted to deal with the female body in a way that was explored not through someone else’s gaze.

I wanted a woman there just with her body, not constructing her identity against anyone or anything else. This is tricky, but I feel like it was important for me to give at least the protagonist agency over her own body, or to portray the ways in which women’s agency is complicated or lacking because of certain attitudes towards their bodies. I did not want to depict women as bad variations on men, which I feel is the way they are often portrayed in social space and discourse in Lebanon.

In Ali and His Russian Mother, it was very important for me to address a very certain type of heroic discourse. It’s used a lot in times of war. Of course the woman’s body is discussed there always as a metaphor — the female body that’s raped stands for the loss of sovereignty over land, or is killed to be conquered; [there’s] the mother’s body that gives the nation its sons. And I wanted to show something else, the actual physical needs of someone, a woman, going though war. I needed to talk about the real, everyday struggles of war, about the huge dissonance between the “un-noble” need to go to the bathroom and the noble-sounding calls to sacrifice oneself for one’s country. Of course, in times of war, women are the biggest losers, but they are often reduced to metaphors. They are rarely allowed to exist for themselves. I kept asking myself: when is blood pure and when is it impure? I needed to address the contrast between these two levels of existence and discourse.

And remember: talking about periods in fus7a is not insulting, because periods are not insulting!

You choose to write in fus7a about very colloquial matters. Why did you choose to do this?

This was the most important thing for me to deal with while I was writing. For me, fus7a is a very difficult tool to use. Writing in fus7a is always already a translation, because you need to translate your own thoughts into writing, and the fact that the pulse of everyday life does not flow through fus7a makes it rigid, especially when it comes to the description of the mundane. It is a question of who owns language and who owns the right to express herself or himself, to make space for herself in society and in literature. You can reach more people in fus7a than you can in dialect. It’s a kind of locus of power: the social structures of authority are recreated within language if you do nothing to stop that.

For me, the way to stop it was to write about young women in Beirut dealing with really important issues, and some unimportant issues, but all of these almost never make it into fus7a in the voice of these women. They are always represented by someone else, through the authority of someone else, and not through their own authority. To break the authority of language and of social space, I tried to infect fus7a with the music of these women’s own language, while bending fus7a to make it do what I wanted. Everyone can use fus7a — why should it only address very “noble” ideas and “noble” causes? Why should authority only be held by a certain group that has grammar and the legal system on their side?

And of course there are colloquialisms in the novel, and the mixture was very important to me. Lots of slang, too, which is also important—it’s very subversive. Periods are subversive, everything is subversive!

What is your relationship with Michelle Hartman, your translator, like? As with any translation project, there is conflict and collaboration; how do you navigate this, particularly as your English is very good and you have the luxury (or curse!) of being able to read the translation?

Michelle and I are very good friends! We talk a lot. I respect her work as a translator—she is so involved in the texts she translates, and it’s important for her to respect the author’s intention. (If there is any such intention!) Basically she wanted me to be as involved as I felt comfortable in the translation. And she didn’t want to take away another woman’s agency! The issue with the translation of Always Coca Cola for me was that, in the original text, I tried to make the prose as clear as possible, and to make it flow as well as possible. Michelle’s political position made her do something very different with the English text: I felt it was choppy and sometimes awkward, and it was part of her political work as a translator. For Michelle, translated texts by Arab women risk being treated as commodities to be consumed. One way she tries to avoid this is that she makes sure the reader always know it’s a translation, by not allowing her or him to have too smooth a ride. In the end, we realized that we were dealing with two different texts.

What is your opinion of the Arabic literature landscape at the moment? Do you get to read a lot outside of your graduate readings?

Anyone would tell you that they read much less than they’d like to. I think there are a lot of very interesting things happening at the moment. There’s a move towards different types of narration I haven’t seen before. And there’s a movement to questions of identity — with special approaches not typical of previous Arabic literature. And there’s a lot of young Arabic writers, and I love seeing how many more young writers there are every year. At the moment, I am reading a poetry collection by a young Egyptian poet, Iman Mersal. I think she has a bold, unique voice. I’m really excited to see where young Arabic literature will go, especially where women will go.

So what are you working on now? I know you are a doctoral candidate at Yale University—what’s your research in?

My current work is about magical realism in Arabic and Hebrew. Even when these two literatures don’t communicate, they use magical realism in very similar ways. For both, magical realism is a tool of expressing minor identities within the nation that are repressed by national identity. For example, the Tawariq identity in Libya for Ibrahim al-Koni and the Kurdish identity in Syria in the case of Salim Barakat. In Hebrew literature, these minorities are the Arab Jews and Palestinians, who write in Hebrew and use magical realism in order to represent their own repressed narratives and histories.

The second part of this interview will appear on Monday.

Alexandra Chreiteh is the author of two novels, Always Coca-Cola and Ali and his Russian Mother. She is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her work has been translated to English and German.

Rachael Daum is a graduate student at Indiana University inflicting Russian literature and language on herself, and vice versa. She is also the Publicity Manager for the American Literary Translators Association, and you can find her @Oopsadaisical.

Although commentators have often suggested Arab women’s literature is over-emphasized in the West, Arabic literature tends to experience a gender imbalance that’s similar to the other languages:

For the most part, this imbalance has been written about anecdotally. But lately, the “Three Percent” site has worked to track who’s being published in translation in the U.S.: women or men. There, Three Percent reports an overall approximate 71/29 imbalance across languages, favoring books by men.

No one has, to my knowledge, been keeping particular track of the gender balance of Arabic-English translations, nor even of which translations are published from Arabic to English worldwide.

The Banipal Prize for Arabic Literature in Translation keeps a sort of track of Arabic literature published in the UK. There, in 2015, there were seven books by women of 29 total considered for the prize (24%); in 2014, two of 17 (11%) were by women. In the US, in 2015, the Three Percent site logged 5 of 20 by women, or 25%.

The ArabLit count in 2014, which attempted to be global, was 7/40, or 17% by female authors. All of this excludes anthologies, which are more likely to be egalitarian. For instance, the excellent 2015 Beirut Noir anthology, ed. Iman Humaydan, featured more than half women’s work. The 2014 Gaza Stories, ed. Atef Abu Saif, also laid emphasis on women’s stories.

Much hay has been made of the reasons behind the overall imbalance: Perhaps there just isn’t that much women’s work, as the Angoulême Festival CEO argued in response to a protest when his Grand Prix excluded women. Or perhaps women’s work just isn’t good enough: France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, has gone to a woman just 11 of the 102 times it’s been awarded. The far younger International Prize for Arabic Fiction has gone to a female novelist just 1/2 a time in eight years: The year it went to Raja Alem, she shared the prize with Mohammed Achaari.

But, as translator Katy Derbyshire writes, all of this begs the question: Does it matter?

On March 10, Free Word will host an event in London titled, “Few Women in the History: Tackling imbalances in international literature.” Ahead of that, Derbyshire argues that — well — women’s presence in translated literature does matter. Derbyshire writes:

In our ongoing efforts to start a literary prize for translated fiction by women, we’ve been leaning heavily on the diversity argument. Novels written by women from other cultures and in other languages really do offer windows into lesser-known worlds. Be they Herta Müller’s Romania under the Securitate or Han Kang’s South Korean domesticity, the (fictional) worlds they contain will often be unlike British readers’ own lives in some ways, but similar in others.

Do women’s books in Arabic — broadly speaking — accomplish something different from men’s writings? Do you get something from reading Hoda Barakat, Iman Humaydan, and Najwa Barakat that you wouldn’t from reading Elias Khoury, Jabbour Douaihy, and Rabee Jaber?

Thus far, I know of only two books coming out this year by female authors translated from the Arabic:

Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette. This surrealist first novel by psychiatrist-writer Abdel Aziz, which appeared in Arabic in 2013, describes Egyptians queueing for hours in front of a mysterious gate. Forthcoming with Melville House Press in May 2016.

Arwa Saleh’s The Stillborn, translated by Samah Selim. Saleh was a key 1970s activist and a writer, and her powerful criticism of Egypt is forthcoming from Seagull Books in Fall 2016.

Do these books offer a different view of Egypt that isn’t found in “men’s” writings, generally? Perhaps, yes. Even Radwa Ashour, who has a muscular multi-generational style that is in many ways similar to her male peers, is different in her emphasis on and interest in women’s lives.

Derbyshire also also suggests that genres that favor women might also draw in new readers, as new types of writing might draw in new readers:

Remember what sparked the current (relative) boom in translated fiction? It was crime writing. Scandinavian detective stories made many readers overcome their reluctance to reach for anything genuinely foreign.

Writing by romance writer Ahlam Mostaghanemi thus far has not made an impact in English, but many of the excellent novels of Hanan al-Shaykh certainly have, as has work by Nawal al-Saadawi.

Over on Facebook, Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani also asks what percentage of books are originally published in Arabic by women. As far as I know, there are no statistics tracking  such a thing, although prizes like Katara and IPAF have made sporadic announcements about how many submissions are from women. IPAF for instance announced 26% had been by women in 2016, with a similar percentage over at Katara for the same year. Certainly, this would only reflect a narrow range of fiction, of the type publishers might think win a literary prize.

As a final incentive to publishers, Derbyshire notes:

Women buy two thirds of all fiction sold in the UK.

And as a final statistic: Saudi Arabia was the only Arab-majority country where Three Percent found more women’s work translated than men’s: 2 male authors and 3 female authors, leaning 60% female. What does that mean?

¯\ _(ツ)_/¯.

Also: More than 40 French publishers have signed a letter saying they won’t participate in next year’s Angoulême unless it makes some major changes. A much easier target than all of publishing, but good for them.

On International Women’s Day, literary translator Elisabeth Jaquette explores the spaces for women in translation from Arabic into English:

By Elisabeth Jaquette

Where are the women in English translation?

There has been great momentum towards quantifying and addressing this question in recent years. Since VIDA: Women in Literary Arts began counting women’s representation in US literary awards, Three Percent has been tallying the ratio of men vs. women being published in translation, with fairly depressing findings.

Across languages, female authors make up 26.6% of all fiction translations and 29.6% of all poetry translations published between 2008 and 2014 in the US. That means for every book in translation by a woman that makes it onto the bookshelves, there are about three books by men. The numbers for Arabic translations are slightly worse: according to ArabLit’s worldwide count, women-authored works accounted for 22.7% of all the Arabic literature in translation published in 2010, and just 17% in 2014, for example.

Publishing’s gender disparity becomes even starker at the prize level. Women in Translation has tracked women’s low representation in literary translation prizes across languages. When it comes to Arabic translation prize-winners, low representation in publishing turns to no representation in awards.

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (administered by the Society of Authors), which has been running for the past ten years, has never been awarded to a book by a female author, and only once did it go to a female translator (Samah Salim, in 2009). At the runner-up and commendation level (the Banipal Prize doesn’t do shortlists or longlists), male and female translators are almost equally represented, but male authors still outnumber female authors more than three to one.

Banipal Prize Winners:
Male authors:              11        (100%)
Female authors:          0          (0%)

Male translators:         10        (91%)
Female translators:     1          (9%)

Banipal Prize Commendations and Runners-up:

Male authors:              10        (77%)
Female authors:          3          (23%)

Male translators:         8          (53%)
Female translators:     7          (47%)

Such stark gender disparity can’t be completely explained by the prize pool, but it’s certainly a contributing factor. Female authors made up only 20% of the prize entries in 2014-5 (these are the only years in which Banipal released the full list of titles under consideration). This generally matches the statistic above: that about 20% of Arabic literature published in English translation is written by women. Here, it would be useful to have figures on what percentage of books are originally published in Arabic by women for comparison, but that data isn’t available.

Banipal Prize Entries, 2014-5:

Male authors:              37        (80%)
Female authors:          9          (20%)

Male translators:         32        (64%)
Female translators:     18        (36%)

Finally, the one gender ratio the prize organizers do have direct control over – the number of men and women judging the prize – also leaves something to be desired. 

Banipal Award Judges:

Male judges:                22        (58%)
Female judges:           16        (42%)

Sobering statistics, overall. The Banipal Prize is the only prize dedicated solely to published translations from the Arabic. The University of Arkansas Translation Award — for unpublished manuscripts — doesn’t release submission information. But how does the Banipal Prize compare to other major translation prizes in evaluating Arabic literature in translation?

Here, I’ve taken a look at Arabic literature winners, shortlisted, and longlisted titles for six main translation awards: the PEN Translation Prize, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, Best Translated Book Award for Poetry, the International Foreign Fiction Prize, and the National Translation Award. Women in Translation has put together prize data for all languages, and here’s how the numbers pan out for Arabic literature included in these awards. Unfortunately, the trends in these awards are generally the same as with the Banipal Prize.

Arabic Literature Winners:

Male authors:              4          (100%)
Female authors:          0          (0%)

Male translators:         4          (100%)
Female translators:     0          (0%)

Arabic Literature Shortlisted:

Male authors:              3          (60%)
Female authors:          2          (40%)

Male translators:         4          (67%)
Female translators:     2          (33%)

Arabic Literature Longlisted:

Male authors:              6          (100%)
Female authors:          0          (0%)

Male translators:         5          (83%)
Female translators:     1          (17%)

The winning authors and translators are exclusively men, similar to statistics for the Banipal Prize. When the shortlists and longlists are combined, there are more than four times as many male authors represented compared to female authors, and three times as many male translators compared to female translators.

One fact that doesn’t come out when you look at the data like this is that –among books at the prize level — men tend to translate male authors, and women tend to translate women authors. But that’s a topic for another day.

Overall, the lesson here would seem to be: If you want to win prizes in translation, don’t be a woman, and don’t translate women.

It’s important to remember that literary prizes like these aren’t an isolated facet of the publishing industry. Award-winning authors are easier to pitch to publishers, which leads to more publications, further increasing the gender disparity. Prize-winning translators are more likely to be approached for future translations, and better positioned to command higher rates — well, as “high” as rates go in literary translation.

When the top prizes in literary translation go exclusively to male authors and male translators, it endorses the idea that when the world translates and publishes a highly disproportionate ratio of men’s writings and men’s translations, literature is better off for it. And that’s just false.

Gender disparity in translated literature persists throughout the industry, from books translated, to reviews published, to prizes awarded. Crunching the numbers is just a start towards addressing — and redressing — it. Meanwhile, this conversation has produced several tangible steps towards doing so: Kamila Shamsie’s provocation to make 2018 the Year of Publishing (only) Women was accepted by stellar small presses And Other Stories, and Tilted Axis, which both primarily publish literature in translation. There have also been efforts to create a literary prize for translated fiction by women — let’s hope that 2016 is the year that gets off the ground.

But prizes be damned and depressing statistics aside, there is great Arabic literature out there being written and translated by women, and International Women’s Day is a great day to read some.

‘Women’s work’ to read now:

Online, there’s Hawa al-Gamodi’s Awaiting a Poem, translated by Nariman Youssef; Rasha Abbas’ Falling Down Politely, translated by Alice Guthrie, and Donia Maher’s The Apartment in Bab el-Louk translated by myself.

In book form, there’s Radwa Ashour’s Blue Lorries, translated by Barbara Romaine, and Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues, translated by Catherine Cobham. And Basma Abdel Aziz’s debut novel The Queue (in my translation) is coming out with Melville House this May. Until then, you can read an excerpt here. Finally, Salma Dabbagh’s Out of It and Mai al-Nakib’s The Hidden Light of Objects are two superb books by Arab women writing in English.

And if you’re in London, go see the Free Word Centre’s event on Tackling Imbalances in International Literature this Thursday, March 10.

Elisabeth Jaquette is an Arabic translator and writer. Her work has been published in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, and her first novel-length translation, The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, is forthcoming with Melville House in May.

Yesterday, Elisabeth Jaquette celebrated International Women’s Day by highlighting gender disparities in translation. Today, for Un-International-Women’s Day, nine works by Arabophone women that shift how we see the possibilities of language:

1) Consorts of the Caliphs, collected and edited by Ibn al-Sa’i’, edited in translation by Shawkat Toorawa, translated by The Editors of the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL). This wide-ranging collection of women’s writings — and anecdotes about said women writers — is out in a newly edited manuscript and facing-page, bilingual edition from the LAL. Words are weapons, and many of these women, who lived in the tenth through thirteenth centuries CE, knew how to wield them. Read more.

2) The Principles of Sufism, ‘A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah (d. 1517 CE). This text was recently edited and translated by Th. Emil Homerin, who said, in a 2014 interview, “I was looking for all sorts of poets, but part of my concern was to see if I could find women poets. I had read about women poets, I had their names — hers I did not have — but of others. People would say, ‘Oh, such-and-such a woman wrote poetry,’ but you could never find it. Or you might find one or two poems, or a few verses in a death notice.”

“‘A’ishah is one of the very few women mystics in Islam who wrote and spoke for herself prior to the modern period,” Homerin said.

3) Nazik Al-Malaika (1923-2007). Skipping over the top of a few centuries, al-Malaika was credited — along with the great Badr Shakir al-Sayyab — with being one of the shape-changers of twentieth-century Arabic verse. But, Emily Drumsta wrote, “Unlike her modernist contemporaries, al-Mala’ika was not ready to throw out the old Arabic meters entirely. Instead, she sought to reconfigure and adapt them for a new era without letting poetry lose its “Arab-ness”—that is, its rootedness in the undulating long and short vowel patterns of the Arabic language.” Read: From ‘A Song for Mankind’ by al-Mala’ika, trans. Drumsta.

4) Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door. Al-Zayyat (1923-1996) was one of Egypt’s twentieth-century remixers of Arabic prose, and also a political figure and a mentor, mentioned by Radwa Ashour in her meta-auto-biographical (a remix, surely) Spectres. From Ashour’s book:

In my initial meetings with Latifa al-Zayyat, her laughter brought me up short. The woman was always surprising me with her continuous, sometimes abrupt, and loud laughter; and then she no longer surprised me — I got used to and grew to love both Latifa herself and her laughter. She was constantly laughing, but when she told me about her experience in prison, she laughed even more. … Latifa al-Zayyat would laugh at herself and at her comrades in the cell as she told the story, so that the whole subject seemed like a comic play — no, not black comedy, despite the darkness of the experience, but rather a marvelous comedy that redeems the tale of stark realities by cleansing it of the blemish of fear, of bitterness, of petty grudges. What remains is the lightness and transparency of the story, as well as the capacity of human beings to overcome adversity with humor.

An excerpt, trans. Marilyn Booth.

5) Stone of Laughter and Tiller of Waters, by Hoda Barakat (b. 1952).

Barakat — who was recently a finalist for the Man Booker International — mixes her Arabic writing with a stern, anti-sentimentalism in her fearless explorations of sect, gender, sexuality, power, belonging. Perhaps her femaleness makes her freer. From an interview with Brian Whitaker: “…I always felt that the men who were near to me suffered more than the women, because a society in crisis asks from men much more than it asks from women. They don’t ask us women which side we are on, but men have to be combatants. They have to declare sides and take up arms and go to battles for what they believe. But women are not public beings, so it gives you more freedom in your head.” An excerpt of Barakat’s most recent novel, trans. Ghada Mourad.

6) Iman Mersal (b. 1966). The poet who was once Egyptian “90s Generation” Iman Mersal is — well, the same Iman Mersal — but has also traveled widely, moved to Canada, shared stories with many poets in Eastern Europe, read deeply, and dissolved all of this, feeding it into her work. In a forthcoming interview, she further names a number of poetic remixers she admires, including poets Sania Saleh, Aya Nabih, Asmaa Yassen, and Malaka Badr. Ten poems by Mersal, translators various.

7) Ghada Abdel Aal’s I Want to Get Married! Does writing by women have to be serious to be a serious literary act? Abdel Aal (b. 1978) is one of the most enjoyable remixers of a new genre works with her funny, satiric Ayza Atgowaz, which started out as a blog, became a book, and then a television series.

8) Alexandra Chreiteh’s Always Coca-Cola and Ali and His Russian Mother stretch the ways in which Lebanese women’s lives, genders, and identities are talked about, and the language in which it happens.

9) Manifesto Against the Woman, by Mona Kareem. Just so we don’t get too kumbaya around here, Mona keeps us on our feet. You can also listen in on the chat she had with ArabLit: Gulf Women’s Writing: On Slavery, Migrant Labor, and Statelessness.

The April issue of Words Without Borders features a section titled “Women Write War,” with fiction, poetry, and essays translated from the Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Ukranian, Bosnian, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Arabic:

The introduction, by Eliza Griswold, opens:

Since Odysseus paddled home to Ithaca, most of the world’s great war stories have belonged to men. Men have written them and men have starred in them, because, for the most part, male soldiers have occupied the frontlines from Sparta to Verdun. In addition, men’s voices have been the dominant voices elsewhere in literature, why not in war?

This may have been the case with many of the classic war epics, where the literate among men left their homes and traveled to fight battles, while literate women were more likely to write on domestic and religious themes. But growing literacy has long since met more rapacious wars; Lebanon’s civil war, for instance, has been a topic for almost any author who found themselves inside the country between 1975-1990.

Is there a difference between men’s and women’s war stories? The Arabic short story in WWB’s April issue, “Mass Grave,” was written by US-based Iraqi author Faleeha Hassan and translated by William Hutchins. It is told from the point of view of a male soldier, and its interests are indistinguishable from those of a male writer. It is somewhat distant from its material, lacking the immediate punch of a short story by Hassan Blasim or Mahmoud Saeed, but nonetheless focused squarely on a moment of (male) war.

But other Iraqi women writers do focus on excavating women’s lives during conflic: Duna Ghali’s recent Orbits of Loneliness, for instance, describes the narrator’s relationship to her young child both before and after the US invasion and occupation. Hadiya Hussein’s Beyond Love, about those living in an emotional no-man’s land after fleeing war.

Certainly, the interest in women’s lives isn’t just the province of women — Iraqi writer Ali Bader consciously focuses on women’s lives during war in his 2015 novel Kaafira, or The Godless Woman. But here, by women:

Lebanon’s Civil War: Hoda Barakat, Stone of Laughter

There are dozens of women’s novels set in and around Lebanon’s 15-year civil war: Hanan al-Shaykh’s classic The Story of Zahra; Najwa Barakat Oh Salaam! which explores how people go on (or don’t go on) with their lives after war; Alexandra Chrieteh’s anti-identitarian Ali and His Russian Grandmother; Etel Adnan’s passionate, feminist Sitt Marie Rose; Zeina Abirached’s graphic novel for young readers, A Game for Swallows; Fatima Sharafeddine’s striking picture book There is War in My City.

But Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat nonetheless stands out as one of the great authors of the war. She’s not interested, as she says, in “men who make history and the characters who believe in something.” She’s interested in the details of life during conflict, in digging underground, in seeing the traces of life left behind by humans.

Barakat generally focuses most of her attention on male characters, and her writing has even been called “anti-feminist.” But although it doesn’t focus on women’s lives, The Stone of Laughter, which centers on a gay protagonist, challenges the rigidities of gender construction in a fresh, unburdened way.

Syria, today: Rasha Abbas, The Gist of It

There are many women’s books about war in contemporary Syria, including two nonfiction books by Samar Yazbek that are available in English translation by Max Weiss (Woman in the Crossfire) and Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (The Crossing). But the stories of Rasha Abbas’s The Gist of It collection eschew the narrative realism that Yazbek and a number of others use. Abbas’s stories fall apart, explode, turn themselves inside out, howl, and force the language in new directions in order to echo young people’s lives in the ripping, broken, wailing war.

From “Falling Down Politely,” which ran in Words Without Borders, trans. Alice Guthrie:

You open your curtains to find a severed head in an elegant planter on the windowsill. It’s bald, and the eyes are peacefully closed. As far as you remember you’ve made no visit to al-Muʿtamid ibn Abbad’s medieval garden of severed heads to pluck this one from among his enemies, so perhaps the early-onset Alzheimer’s promised by your mother’s genes is setting in already. Or maybe al-Muʿtamid himself arrived in Damascus last night bearing these heads of his as gifts borne along—as you saw in a waking dream last night—in a convoy darkened by the shadow of a thousand curved swords, which blocked the way through the Bab Sharqi old city gate. You sat down on a wooden chair there once, right on the curbside, worn out from a show-off drinking binge that hadn’t made you look hard like it was meant to; a German tourist dabbed at your brow with a damp piece of cloth, saying “You’ll be all right,” in a scornful Germanic English voice. Then you got into a taxi with your broke friends and terrified them— you were so out of it that you actually launched into a mangled recitation of an Old Testament psalm in broken Hebrew (you had just about learned the basics of it) as the taxi driver stared distrustfully at you in the rearview mirror. “Give thanks to the Lord!” you said to him in Arabic, as if in response to his glares, then completed the line in your dodgy Hebrew “keiy . . . leiawlaam . . . khasdu” (“for his steadfast love endures forever”).

Palestine, late 1940s: Sahar Khalifah’s Of Noble Origins

This novel, trans. Aida Bamia, is remarkable not just for the attention it shows a multiethnic Palestine just before war descends, but because of its interest in individual women’s lives thatwere largely not recorded by history but who certainly participated in “history-making” events.

It’s similar to Elias Khoury’s seminal As Though She Were Sleeping, yet Khalifeh is less interested in great shifts, and more interested in the rough individual lives of women. Of Noble Origins is unusual in that it treats the lives of Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Muslims, Jewish immigrants, and British colonial leadership with an equal narrative interest.

Algieria, 1830s: Assia Djebar’s Fantasia

Djebar uses the voices of the French colonial officers and soldiers as they invade her country, standing them counterpoint against the stories of a girl growing up in the coastal town of Cherchel. Where only the masculine, invading force is available — only their stories of the 1830 invasion, for instance, have survived — Djebar uses them to tell her own story.

The work of Iraqi novelist underwent a serious shift in the last few years. From a piece in Qantara:

Ali Bader could have rested on his laurels. As an author of philosophical fictions, Bader achieved significant acclaim both in Arabic and in translation. But last year, when the Iraqi writer issued his twelfth novel, al-Kaafira (The Godless Woman), he was signaling a major break with his previous body of work.

With the female-focused al-Kaafira, Bader says, he leaves behind his masculinist first eleven novels.

Bader, who was born in Baghdad, began by writing and acting in the theatre and in film. His debut novel, Papa Sartre (2001), came at a moment of political change for Iraq and the wider region. After that, Bader issued a steady stream of novels that interleave philosophy and history. These books often center on the lives of male musicians, artists, and intellectuals. Bader said that, while writing these books, he was focused on how societies shift “under the pressure of history.”

Acclaim was not slow in coming: Papa Sartre won Bader a State Prize for Literature in Baghdad in 2002. His other novels also won critical and readerly applause. Both his 2009 and 2010 novels, Kings of the Sands and The Tobacco Keeper, were longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and The Tobacco Keeper has been translated into both English and French. But after writing another novel in 2011, Prophecies of Illusion, Bader decided he could no longer keep writing the same sorts of books.

“So I stopped for three years: to read, to study, and also to experiment.”

It wasn’t just his aesthetics that changed in 2011, Bader says. His ideas about socio-political change underwent a massive shift. After what followed the 2011 Arab uprisings, he said, democratic reforms no longer seemed like enough. His interest shifted from the mechanisms of political reform to a social revolution. Women’s liberation, he said, “is at the heart” of this.

Then it was late 2014. Bader was in a refugee camp in Belgium when he met an Iraqi woman in a bar. He discovered later that she was also living at the camp, and the story of her life inspired him to write al-Kaafira. Keep reading at Qantara.

So tweeted Egyptian writer Yasmin El-Rifae, when sharing the list of 10 — which was really 15, because sometimes one can’t help oneself — books by women writers that should be translated from Arabic to English:

The list appears on lithub and is led off by a screed against the “Saving Muslim Women” genre, followed by a pitch for Hoda Barakat’s latest novel, Kingdom of this Earth. Barakat was on the 2015 shortlist for the Man Booker International, and yet this novel has no contract for an English translation.

Other authors on the list include Barakat’s sister, the prominent author and literary mentor Najwa Barakat, as well as Radwa Ashour, Sahar Mandour, Rasha Abbas, Taghreed Najjar, Donia Maher, Duna Ghali, and Eman Abdel Rahim. Each book has a brief on why it “should” be translated: You can read them here.

Tacked onto the end are five classic works by women, which are: collected poetry by Nazik al-Malaika, Safinaz Kazem’s Romantikayyet, Samira Azzam’s Al-sa’aa w al-inssaan, Bint al-Shati’s Alaa al-Jisr, and Sahar Khalifeh’s Bab al-Saha.

Contributor Nadia Ghanem also added six Algerian women authors whose works should be translated into English.

On the seventh of July, PEN Lebanon will celebrate four women writers: Rasha al-Ameer, Elfriede Jelinek, Leila Baalbaki, and Ingeborg Bachmann:

Of these four women writers, one hasn’t had a book translated into English, despite her prominence in Arabic: Leila Baalbaki.

You can read Rasha al-Ameer’s Judgment Day in very strong translation by Jonathan Wright. Work by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek is, of course, available in English, as is poetry by fellow Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973).

Indeed, the head of PEN Lebanon, Iman Humaydan, posted on Facebook that it was “astonishing for me to discover that Laila Baalbaki’s work has not been translated into English yet.” Humaydan said she’d been searching for an English translation of Baalbaki’s Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon when she discovered the absence.

Humaydan noted that Spaceship was banned, “sent to trial in Lebanon during the 1960s. … Baalbaki’s words and freedom of spirit triggered a wide reaction started from Egypt and reached Lebanon….”

Baalbaki was born in Beirut in 1936. AUB Professor Roseanne Khalaf said, in an interview with NOW Lebanon, that she thought “what made Leila Baalbaki, in particular, interesting is because for the first time, it wasn’t women trying to imitate men. They sort of found their own voice.”

Baalbaki’s debut novel, I Live, was also banned in Lebanon, yet made the list of the “top 105 novels of the 20th century,” assembled by the Arab Writers Union. It has been translated into French and German, but is not available in English.

But it is an excerpt of Baalbaki’s Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon that will be read, in Maia Tabet’s excellent new translation, on Thursday evening. Tabet and Humaydan have given permission to run an excerpt of an excerpt here.

He drew his arms off my chest (it was 9 o’clock in the morning now) and my eyelids fluttered open. He was lying on his face and stroking my cheek all the way up to my ear, his hair, which covered the entire surface of the pillow, in my eyes. Soft against my neck, his breath irritated the remnants of summer sunburns on my shoulder that would be there until next summer. As it dissipated, the touch of his breath burrowed under the cotton sheet and burst forth from the blue vein of his foot lying over mine.

(No, no. He is dead!)

Mumbling into the pillow, he asked why my foot had moved away from under his.  He stretched out his arms, feeling for the edge of the covers. From my thigh, his hand slithered down to my foot, and I squeezed it tight between my legs. After drawing its contours, he enveloped my foot in his hand, breath boiling.

(No, no. He is dead!)

He shifted about, lifted his head tepidly, and pitched it inside my neck, whispering that I was his feral cat, roaming city streets leading to the sea, wandering in the rain through the mud and the biting cold, and coming back to him at night wet, hungry, and in search of warmth. So why couldn’t I calm down, you know, calm down a little, just calm down. His breath meanders through his contented body, lying like a child sleeping by an open window and counting the stars, one after the other, without adding them lest a wart grow on his hand, and remembering the story he heard before going to sleep—that angels, carrying little ones on their blue wings, fly off to heaven with them, piercing the clouds, cracking open the sky, and landing on a tree. The naked body next to me quivers.

(No, no. He is dead!)

For the rest of the excerpt, and work by the other three writers, be at the Monnot Theatre in Beirut on Thursday, July 7, at 8:30 p.m.

And, if you are in Marseilles on July 8, don’t miss an Alifbata event on “Youth, Sexuality, and Poetry” featuring comix artists Lena Merhej and Barrack Rima (Lebanon), Mai Koraiem (Egypt), Noha Habaieb (Tunisia) and Zineb Benjelloun (Morocco).

This August marks the third annual Women in Translation month, held with the aim of encouraging readers, reviewers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians – but especially readers – to engage with women writers in translation:

Women writers represent only about 30 percent of what’s translated into English. “And,” Women-in-Translation-month founder Meytal Radzinski writes over at her introduction to #WITMonth, “if you don’t mind me throwing in some anecdotal evidence as well, women writers in translation seem significantly less likely to get profiled by major literary outlets and are less likely to have their books sent for review.”

Meytal is curating lists of women’s writing in translation on Twitter (@Biblibio). German translator and “Translationista” Susan Bernofsky also has a list of recommended new works over at her blog that include Palestinian-Chilean novelist Lina Meruane’s stunning Seeing Red (2016), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, as well as Dunya Mikhail’s 2014 poetry collection Iraqi Nights, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

As Arabic-English translator Lissie Jaquette wrote over at ArabLit, the problem certainly pervades Arabic literature in translation. Like many literary prizes around the world, the main Arabic literary prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), which is also called the “Arabic Booker,” often overlook women’s writing. Why Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue failed to make even the IPAF’s longlist should be a mystery to anyone.

There are younger literary prizes, like CairoComix, that have celebrated women’s work, and smaller ones, like the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, which was long headed up by feminist literary critic Samia Mehrez. But many publishers look to the Booker-surrogate literary prize for guidance.

On the positive side, novelist Kamila Shamsie’s challenge to make 2018 the Year of Publishing (only) Women was accepted by small presses And Other Stories and Tilted Axis; both primarily publish literature in translation. There have also been efforts to create a literary prize for translated fiction by women. And translator Katy Derbyshire reports that ocelot bookshop on Brunnenstraße in Berlin has put together a wonderful display for #WITMonth.

There’s still much to be done. But we can start below.

Bonus: All the books below were at least co-translated by women.

Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, trans. Elisabeth Jaquette (May 2016), Mellville House Books.

The Queue – an exploration of post-2011 Egypt originally published in 2013 – is a work of magico-political realism, the literary child of Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and English writer George Orwell, with a bonus: Abdel Aziz is one of the few to really write down the details of Egyptian women’s lives and to craft female characters who come from a wide variety of social classes.

Alawiyya Sobh’s Maryam, Keeper of Stories, trans. Nirvana Tanoukhi (June 2016), Seagull Books.

There is even a literary award named for Alawiyya Sobh (the “Alawiya Sobh Literary Criticism Award”), but this is the first of her works translated into English. This acclaimed novel, originally published in 2002, is set during the Lebanese Civil War and presents portraits of women’s lives during the conflict.

Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution, ed. and co-translated by Rebekah Maggor and Mohammed Albakry (August 2016), Seagull Books.

This collection includes “The Mirror,” by Yasmeen Emam, in which “a teenage girl is paralyzed by the question of whether to wear a revealing or conservative dress to the wedding of a man she dreamed of marrying.” It was written in 2009 and was first produced in Cairo in January 2014, and more recently staged in Boston and at Rowan University outside Philadelphia.

Iman Humaydan’s The Weight of Paradise, trans. Michelle Hartmann (September 2016), Interlink Books.

In The Weight of Paradise, documentary filmmaker Maya Amer discovers a suitcase full of letters, photographs, a diary, and an envelope labeled, “Letters from Istanbul.” The story follows both Maya and the owner of the papers, Noura Abu Sawwan, a journalist who fled Syria just before the Lebanese civil war.

Jana Elhassan’s The Ninety-ninth Floor, trans. Michelle Hartmann, 99^th floor (November 2016), Interlink Books.

Jana is the only woman writer to have been twice shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and her The Ninety-ninth Floor, which takes place between Lebanon and New York City, made the 2015 shortlist. Its protagonist, Majed, is a Palestinian refugee who was raised in Beirut and is also shaped by the massacres of Lebanon’s long civil war, split between the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres and 2000 New York.

This week, a group of six emerging writers joined two award-winning novelists — Hammour Ziada and Mohammed Hasan Alwan — for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)’s eighth nadwa, held at Qasr Al Sarab, a desert retreat in Abu Dhabi:

Authors and mentors at work. Photo courtesy IPAF.

Alwan and Ziada have both had novels shortlisted for the IPAF, as well as taking other awards: Ziada the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature and Hasan Alwan the Prix de la Littérature Arabe, among others.

They led the group of six emerging Arab authors in an annual week-long workshop.

This year’s six participants were all young writers — between 30 and 38 — who had been identified by IPAF organizers as “emerging talent.” Four of the six were women, and four of the six from GCC nations.

They are, according to the IPAF release:

Eyad Abdulrahman (Saudi Arabia) is a writer and novelist, born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in 1987. He obtained a BA in Computer Engineering from Utah University, an MA in Software Engineering from Chicago University, and a second MA in Computer Science and Education Technology from Harvard University. He is currently finishing his doctorate from Harvard University, focusing on the same field of study. His published works of fiction include a collection of prose texts entitled Emancipation (2012) and two novels, The Misfortune of Life (2014) and The Caliph (2015).

Nidaa Abu Ali (Saudi Arabia) is a writer and diplomat, born in 1983. In 2009, she obtained an MA in Strategic Studies, specialising in counter terrorism, from Singapore, and worked as a political analyst at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism as well as at the Middle East Institute in Singapore. She is the author of four novels: The Days Passed (published in 1998 when she was 15), The Heart Has Other Faces (also 1998), Paper Flutes (2003) and Shadow and Mirror (2011). She also works as a journalist, publishing literature and film reviews and political analysis.

Rabab Haidar (Syria) is a writer and translator, born in 1977. She has a BA in English Literature and is a translator accredited by the Palace of Justice in Damascus. In 2013, she published two books in translation: The Book of the Female, the translation into English of a volume of poetry by the Bahraini poet Iman Aseeri, and (from English to Arabic) the autobiography of a contestant on the Arabic ‘Survival’ programme. Her first novel Land of the Pomegranate was published in 2012.

Leila al-Mutawa (Bahrain) is a novelist and journalist, born in 1986. She is well known for her articles and writings defending women’s rights, which have been widely translated, and she writes several blogs. She has one published novel My Heart is Not for Sale (2012) and has mentored aspiring writers on the Al-Jil workshop project. The Saudi writer Fahd ‘Arishi wrote about her life in his book of biographies of influential people, Dreams Do Not Die (2015).

Hecham Mechbal (Morocco) is a researcher and novelist, born in 1979. He obtained a PhD in Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis from Tetouan University, where he is a member of the Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis forum. His field of research is rhetoric and narrative. As well as a number of academic studies, he is the author of a biography of a political prisoner, Dreams of the Darkness (2003) and two novels: The Free Bird (2009) and Bells of Fear (2014). He is a regular contributor to academic journals and participant in seminars in Morocco and abroad. His novel The Free Bird won the Moroccan Channel 2 Prize in its third edition, and in 2010 he was awarded the Abdelmalek Essaadi University Award for Excellence.

Lamees Yousef (UAE) is a presenter and novelist. After studying Media at Sharjah University, Lamees Yousef worked in media and events management at the Dubai World Trade Centre. She researched and presented ‘Cultural Dimensions’, a programme for Sama Dubai TV in collaboration with the Dubai Cultural and Scientific Association, which won the 2015 Al-Owais Award for Creativity. In 2014, she published a novel, Rock, Paper, Scissors, and her next novel, White Clothes in the Cooking Pot will be launched at the 2016 Sharjah Book Fair.

Several previous nadwa participants have gone on to be shortlisted for the IPAF, including Hassan Alwan. Other previous nadwa participants include IPAF winner Ahmed Saadawi (Frankenstein in Baghdad), shortlisted novelist Mohammed Rabie (Otared), and shortlisted novelist Shahla Ujayli (A Sky Close to Our House).

“A nadwa such as this reaffirms to us that writing is an activity worth travelling and taking time out for in an isolated location, something that has become an unthinkable luxury in today’s world,” Hasan Alwan said in a prepared statement. “Since writing a novel is a lengthy project, it sorely needs the different perspectives offered by six writers who have withdrawn from the routine of their daily lives and joined the nadwa purely for the sake of writing. In a single week the nadwa’s special programme puts writing under two microscopes: the writer alone with his text in deliberate isolation and the other writers who read the text as it is going through initial birth pangs, identifying with the writer in his moments of confidence and doubt.”

Writers, mentors, and prize administrator Fleur Montanaro. Photo courtesy IPAF.

“Serious” literature is, in most languages, a male-dominated business. Literary works translated into English have hovered around a 70-30 split:

Exotic and kitchsy?

This often reflects a bias in the source language, and indeed the Arabic literature of prizes and festivals has generally been the province of men. There are some exceptions, such as the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, steered by the eminent Samia Mehrez. The world of comix has also been a more egalitarian one: While France’s Angouleme comix prize had its “30 men, 0 women” year, the inaugural CairoComix prizes went to a majority of women winners.

This year’s Cairo Literature Festival — which ran Feb. 11 – 16 — put its focus on women writers, with 30 of the 50 writers identifying as women. It featured some of the language’s leading women writers, including the poet Iman Mersal, who launched her new book, How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts.

However, according to a report in Mada Masr, some participants felt the way in which women’s writing was promoted was “exotic and kitschy,” and with an apparent lack of respect for some of the authors. Award-winning Egyptian novelist May Telmissany reportedly said at her panel: “I do not believe literature has a sex.”

Meanwhile, in Ursula Lindsay’s report from the Casablanca Book Fair, which also took place mid-February, she gave numbers from a new report on publishing in Morocco that suggested women’s writing remains a minority pursuit:

The King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Human Sciences and Islamic Studies—a Saudi-funded association and library dedicated to encouraging research in the Maghreb region—has just issued its second report on publishing in Morocco. The report catalogued 3,304 new publications in 2016, including 497 academic journals (it excluded textbooks, manuals and publications in the hard sciences). Literary works make up the highest percentage of the publications (25 percent), followed by writing on the law (14 percent) and religion (10 percent). About a quarter of all books are self-published, and 86 percent of the authors are male.*

This year is also the first — in a ten-year history — that the judging panel for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction was dominated by women. The internationally acclaimed Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh is the judging chair, and there was some noise on social media about whether this meant women’s writing would be favored. But as has been the case most years, there is only one woman’s book on the shortlist, Najwa Binshatwan’s The Slaves’ Pens, with Renée Hayek’s The Year of the Radio not advancing.

*Bolding mine.

This week, organizers announced the first ever Warwick Prize for Women in Translation — although it was, I think, supposed to get its big reveal today:

In any case, the debut Warwick will be awarded this November “to the best eligible work of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction or work of fiction for children or young adults written by a woman and translated into English by a female or male translator,” according to organizers.

The £1,000 prize will be divided between the writer and translator or translators, with each contributor receiving an equal share.

The prize is, unfortunately, only for books published in the UK, which means Trumplandia will have to start their own prize. From the new prize website:

The prize aims to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. A recent report by Nielsen Book showed that translated literary fiction makes up only 3.5% of the literary fiction titles published in the UK, but accounts for 7% of the volume of sales. If translated literature as a whole is underrepresented on the British book market, then women’s voices in translation are even more peripheral. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for example, was awarded 21 times, but was won by a woman only twice.

In the words of Maureen Freely, current President of English PEN and Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick: “We’ve come a long way with the championing of world literature over the past decade, welcoming in a multiplicity of voices which have gone on to enrich us all. In the same period, however, we’ve noticed that it is markedly more difficult for women to make it into English translation. This prize offers us an opportunity to welcome in the voices and perspectives we’ve missed thus far.”

The judging panel for this year will be made up of a team of three, one of whom will be appointed chair.  The three judges this year: Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin, and Susan Bassnett.

Submissions open on April 3 of this year, and guidelines and an entry form can be found on the prize website. The entry form must be submitted not by the translator or author, but by the UK or Irish publisher of the translation. They also ask for five hard copies of the translation and one hard copy of the original. Entries will close on July 3.

Any queries, according to the website, can be addressed to womenintranslation@warwick.ac.uk.