Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a new Palestinian literary and culture magazine, the 2023 PEN Open Book Award longlist, and more. From a Palestinian literary festival to the birthday celebration for the “national poet” of Romania, read on to learn more!
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine
A first is always exciting, always an event; in fact, it’s called “a first” even if a second never comes. And when there is a second time, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and to remember the first.
This week the Palestinian literary community is anticipating both a first and a second.
The Palestinian literary scene is witnessing the birth of Fikra Magazine, an online Palestinian cultural and literary magazine – writing and art by and for Palestinians. According to partners and co-founders Aisha and Kevin, Fikra is dedicated to “high-quality content that doesn’t conform to stereotypes and old-fashioned ideas about Palestine. It’s original, it’s inspiring, it’s bold.” What is exciting about this new publication is that every piece is professionally translated from Arabic to English—or vice versa. Since “Palestinians in the Diaspora often don’t read Arabic as their mother tongue,” the creators say in their promotional materials, “we want our writers to become part and parcel of the international writing-guild as well.” In Fikra, the creators promise, “you’ll find Palestinian writers and artists from all corners of the word – from Gaza, the West-Bank, East-Jerusalem, 48, and the diaspora.”
Fikra is running a crowdfunding campaign until February 9th to raise the last 30% of the needed budget for their first issue, expected in April 2023. Don’t miss the well-prepared visuals and videos on their social media.
In an exciting second, the second Palestine Writes Literature Festival is set to take place at the University of Pennsylvania (located on the unceded homeland of the Lenni Lenape Nation of Turtle Island) on September 22-24, 2023. While the first Palestine Writes in 2020 was held on Zoom because of the pandemic, the upcoming 2023 iteration will be a primarily in-person event (tickets are now available).
According to organizers, the festival was “born from the pervasive exclusion from or tokenization of Palestinian voices in mainstream literary institutions,” and aims to bring “Palestinian cultural workers from all parts of Historic Palestine and our exiled Diaspora together with peers from other marginalized groups in the United States.”
Palestinian politics seem fragmented and foggy, so it is a delight to see the literary community coming together, shining, blooming, and more inclusive!
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
At the end of last year, Guatemalan editor Raúl Figueroa Sarti, the founder of F&G Editores, received yet another distinction for his work, which spans over three decades. The Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara (FIL) gave Raúl the Homenaje al Mérito Editorial. This award was created in 1993 to honor the “vision and work of outstanding editors,” and previous winners include Editorial Anagrama’s Jorge Heralde and Éditions Métailié’s Anne Marie Métailié. Throughout his career, Sarti has published work by distinguished Guatemalan and Central American writers including Miguel Angel Asturias, Carolina Escobar Sarti, and Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez.
Sarti is not the only figure in Central American literature who has been honored recently. On January 20th, Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli shared a remembrance of the famed poet, priest, and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal, who passed in 2020. On social media, Gioconda shared one of her lesser-known poems, called Poema del amor que no fue, which she wrote in 2015 for Cardenal’s 90th birthday. Ernesto Cardenal is one of Central and Latin America’s most beloved and celebrated poets; he published close to fifty books throughout his life.
Finally, also at the end of January, the Salvadoran Colombian novelist Alejandro Varela, who last year was a finalist for the National Book Award for his debut novel The Town of Babylon, and the Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora were longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards. Varela and Zamora are both up for the PEN Open Book Award. Additionally, Zamora made it to the longlist of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for his memoir Solito.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania and Spain
For the past few days, the Romanian literary and cultural world at home and abroad has been festively marking Mihai Eminescu’s 173rd birthday. Born on Jan 15th, 1850, the (post-)Romantic/early modernist “national poet” is author of a gigantic and unfathomably diverse oeuvre of tens of thousands of pages penned in a short and troublesome lifetime and released mostly posthumously. For over a century, Eminescu has been celebrated as arguably the most iconic Romanian poet of all time. His work has had wide popular impact and, inevitably, been used to further political agendas. The celebratory events in Bucharest this year thus naturally ranged from community fairs to concerts (featuring Eminescu’s lyrics) to museum open-door days to children’s fun-educational activities. The events have been interdisciplinary, international, and translational. Among the most notable international moments was the Ateneo de Madrid’s Jan 17th “Dia de la Cultura Rumana” evening co-organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Romanian Embassy in Spain with the support of the Romanian Center (ILR) at Complutense University (UCM). Music and poetry recitals featured Eminescu alongside a host of other highlights from Romanian literature in both the original and Spanish translation. The chair of the event, José Manuel Lucía Megías, also lectured on Eminescu’s work as revisited by his translator(s) at a colloquium organized by the ILR Center at UCM on Jan 16th.
Eminescu’s legacy, if at times contested, seems to be strong on quite a number of fronts indeed. He provided a model of a polymath and genre-versatile poet, embodied today by personalities such as musician-writer Călin Torsan who recently launched no less than two albums and a Spam Book collection, while his fusion of poetry and politics lives on in poets like Asymptote contributor Diana Manole who is fearlessly siding with women protesters in Teheran.
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