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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest on book festivals in Nairobi, a spotlight on Indian crime fiction, and changes to publishing norms in Sweden.

In this round-up of literary news, our editors inform on the dialogues and contemporary themes surrounding literary festivals in Kenya; an event celebrating genre fiction in India; and what publishers are doing to switch things up in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

Book festival season is back in Nairobi, and first in line is—as always—Alliance Française’s Nyrobi Book Fest. The fourth edition of this festival, held from April 11 to 13, was a vibrant celebration of Kenyan storytelling, drawing a significant attendance under the theme “A Decade of Kenyan Stories: Past, Present and Beyond.” The festival offered a rich program, including writing masterclasses, storytelling sessions, book launches, and engaging panel discussions, between which attendees had the opportunity to connect with a diverse array of exhibitors such as Writers Space Africa-Kenya, eKitabu, Mvua Press, NAICONN, Mystery Publishers, NuriaBookstore, Writers Guild Kenya, and Jahazi Press, as well as interact with acclaimed authors like Peter Kimani, author of Dance of the Jacaranda; Billy Kahora, editor of Let Us Conspire and Other Short Stories; Iman Verjee, author of Who Will Catch Us if We Fall; Wangari the Storyteller; Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust; and Remy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One. The three-day festival particularly celebrated the creativity of young Kenyan writers, fostering inspiring conversations and discussions that underscored the dynamic landscape of Kenyan literature.

Following the Book Fest, Nairobi’s literary scene will continue to thrive with the fourth Nairobi Litfest, a festival of ideas by Bookbunk and Hay Festival, which is scheduled for June 26 to 29. Curated by Wanjeri Gakuru under the compelling theme of “exploring alternative knowledge systems,” this year’s edition will activate public spaces across the city, taking place at the McMillan Memorial Library, Eastlands Library, and Kaloleni Library. Building on the success of previous NBO Lit Fests, this edition promises a “thrilling experience” that will gather readers, thinkers, and writers for deep reflection, radical imagination, and collective action, addressing the urgent need for fresh perspectives in today’s world. READ MORE…

Blog Editor Highlights: Spring 2025

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Palestine, France, and the United States!

This week, our editors take us behind-the-scenes at book festivals, from a festival spotlighting Latin American literature in Los Angeles to Paris’s Festival du Livre. From workshops on reimagining fairytales to a look at the only Palestinian-owned publishing house in America, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Beneath the glittering glass ceiling of the Grand Palais, Paris welcomed over 114,000 attendees for its fourth annual Festival du Livre last weekend. The festival is a hub for publishing professionals and book lovers alike, promoting both Francophone and international literature to French-speaking readers and offering insights into the literary and cultural landscape of today.

Among an extraordinarily diverse selection of programming, a few of my personal favorites included a workshop on reimagining classic fairytales and a seminar on resisting the language of fascism—an examination of far-right language and how it is actively influencing popular discourses “blurring traditional political markers and weakening collective memory.”

Thousands of authors and publishers took part in the festival, as they do every year. Among them was Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani, whose previous works have been highly praised and have even been awarded prestigious prizes like the Prix Goncourt (Chanson douce, 2016). Slimani’s newest novel, J’emporterai le feu, was released in January of this year and concludes her Le Pays des autres trilogy.

In fact, Moroccan literature was the festival’s special cultural focus this year. Thirty-two publishers of Moroccan voices were present at the festival, most of them taking part in one of the many events offered at the Moroccan Pavilion—a dedicated space designed to highlight the country’s multilingual literary tradition and its “image as a cultural crossroads between tradition and modernity.” The events included a number of creative writing workshops, author talks, and even a seminar on translation and cultural reception of the Moroccan novel.

The Festival du Livre wasn’t the only event on which French readers could slake their thirst this month. Hors Limites, a festival hosted by the Association Bibliothèques en Seine Saint-Denis, seeks to highlight contemporary literature and address reading as a dialogue between creators and consumers. This festival, though smaller, still featured dozens of workshops and author meetings in Ile-de-France.

Among the authors present was Palestinian author Karim Kattan (whose 2021 interview with Asymptote can be found here). Kattan’s most recent novel, Eden à l’aube, was recently awarded the 2024 Prix de la Cagnotte. An English translation of his first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, was recently released by Foundry Editions. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

What’s the antidote to a world of trade wars and closed borders? Quite possibly our Spring issue, celebrating the free circulation of ideas!

What do we need from each other? What do we gain if we give? At the dawn of a new age of tariffs, the dominant mode of exchange has become a kind of brute transactionalism—before one hands over anything, one must demand something of equal value in return. But what if simply giving is the better way to flourish—the way to a richer commons? It is in this spirit that we proudly unveil “The Gift.” Gathering new work from as far afield as ParaguayLesothoSenegal, and Guyana, our Spring 2025 edition centers the generosity of translation—an act that Youn Kyung Hee, invoking Paul Celan, rightly compares to a gift: “For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass.” How fitting, then, that our interview section, which usually features major authors in the world literature canon (such as the recently deceased Mario Vargas Llosa, in our Spring 2018 issue), cedes the floor to two of the most prominent practitioners of the art working today: Robin Moger, acclaimed translator of contemporary and classical Arabic literature, and Anton Hur, who went from debuting as a translator in these pages nine years ago to becoming the Booker International Prize-nominated voice in English of Korean authors like Sang Young Park. Hur’s interview pairs perfectly with our Korean Literature Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, whose many highlights include Jeong Ho-seung’s bittersweet “sorrow by special delivery” and talented director-writer Lee Chang-dong’s absurd comedy in which a scrounging couple on vacation return to find their house burgled.

blog_Spring_2025_issue-announcement

Elsewhere in this edition beautifully illustrated by South Korean guest artist GLOO / Yejin Lee, the theme of gifts—often passed down from the generation prior—persists. The opening trio of pieces (Men and BreadLong Shadows, and Taxidermy) each consider the tendrils of paternal legacy, but the title of most dad-haunted narrator might be a contest between Pierric Bailly tracing the real-life events leading up to his father’s death in the woods and Song Seung Eon’s imaginary fisherman addressing his macabre haul (“Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?”). In Christopher Carter Sanderson’s sparkling update of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Gull, by contrast, Treplev wrestles with having a celebrity for a mother. (“On her own, she’s a sexy young actress. When I’m near, she looks like a soccer mom.”) Monica Ong—whose visual poems drawing on astronomy have been featured in  Scientific American, among other places—likens her parents to intrepid “cosmonauts” for migrating from their native Philippines to a new home in the US. Finally, against the backdrop of brutal deportations from the US, poet Judith Santopietro calls attention to the gifts inherent even in the most dangerous of international journeys, juxtaposing a glimpse of black orchids from atop a freight train with the eventual hardship of “distributing food and christmas gifts” in a foreign land. Too often portrayed as mere victims, Santopietro’s poem reminds us of the agency of immigrants, inviting us to recognize their journeys as choices they have made, and to consider that these, too, may be gifts, if we allow that possibility.

If Asymptote has been a gift to you, consider helping us stick around so that it may be a gift to others down the road. Remember: the best way to support us is to join us as a sustaining or masthead member (and signing up only takes three minutes, but the good it does reverberates through time).

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April 2025: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

From translation workshops to potential grants, we bring you the latest of this month's opportunities in translation.

EDUCATION

BRISTOL TRANSLATES

It’s that time of year again – applications are now open for the 2025 Bristol Translates Summer School!

Bristol Translates participants will have the opportunity to engage in translation workshops from a variety of languages into English, as well as a few for those working out of English. This year’s session will also include a brand-new set of workshops for translators working out of Urdu and Swedish. Another new offering this year includes the option to attend the school’s professional development sessions, even if you aren’t attending the language workshops themselves. The Summer School is aimed at translators of every level, as well as those who are simply passionate about literary translation.

Comma Press will also be presenting their 2025 Emerging Translator Award. The award is open to Bristol Translates participants working on Chinese, Urdu, and Japanese. The winning translator will be considered for publication in a future Comma Press anthology.

The sessions will take place from July 7th-11th, 2025. You can find more information on how to apply to both the workshops and the professional sessions on the Bristol Translates website. The application closes May 7th.

 

BCLT RESEARCH SEMINAR: PARATEXTS AS POLITICAL PRACTICE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

Europe’s tides of revolution in the 18th and 19th century gave birth to new, radical translation practicestranslators sought to integrate ideas of equality and freedom into new contexts within the fast-paced world of revolution, and reimagined the relationship between source and target cultures in the fight for universal rights. What emerged from these new ideas was an image of translators as agents of political and social change who actively worked to change the shape of history.

At this research seminar hosted by the British Centre of Literary Translation, Rosa Mucignat, a Reader in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and co-editor of Comparative Critical Studies, will present her research on radical translators. She is the author of  Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies and co-editor of Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives. Her work on the project ‘Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture Between Britain, France and Italy, 1789-1815’ led to a co-edited special issue of the journal History of European Ideas. The co-edited volume Radical Voices and Revolutionary Discourses of Translation is forthcoming from Routledge.

The seminar will take place Wednesday, April 30th at 4p.m. BST, and can be attended in-person or online. Register here.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain, and India!

In this week of updates from around the world, our Editors-at-Large in Bulgaria, Ireland, and India cover events and awards around key figures in their countries’ respective literary traditions, from the legacies of monumental writers to the emergence of new and impassioned voices. 

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

I discovered Viktor Paskov, a Bulgarian writer and musician, in my early twenties. His books, which without fail reminded me of harmonically complex jazz compositions, left me enthralled and, unsurprisingly, with a wonderful melody stuck inside my head. Despite Paskov’s untimely passing at the age of 59 in 2009, his legacy is very much alive, and his work continues to inspire and stimulate the minds of his readers.

A recent example of his lingering influence is The Literature and Translation House’s announcement of the official launch of a new translation award under his name. The initiative has been made possible through a collaboration with Sofia University and, specifically, its Master’s degree program in translation and editing. According to the organizers, among them Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, a French translator specialized in the Bulgarian language, “the award’s goal is to honor texts that demonstrate an excellent command of the Bulgarian language in all of its expressive possibilities, coherence, and an ethical approach to the original text—to its rhythm, language(s), registers, historicity, images, and worlds.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

A growing boycott movement in the Philippines, Macedonia's most prestigious poetry award, and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival!

This week, our editors bring you the latest on a prestigious poetry award in North Macedonia; a Filipino comics movement leading the boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair; and Hong Kong’s ever-exciting and evolving international intersections in letters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Throughout the years, the main event in the Macedonian literary scene has been the Struga Poetry Evenings’ awarding of the prestigious Golden Wreath, which has gone to lauded writers such as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes. This year, the prize is given to the Slovak poet Ivan Štrpka; the decision to crown him as this year’s laureate was unanimous, for his “rich, authentic and significant poetic corpus created over six decades.”

Štrpka, born in 1944, has maintained an engaged approach to art from the beginning of his career, committing himself to both moral and aesthetic values and continually incorporating contemporaneous cultural themes. In the 1960s, together with the poets Ivan Laučík and Peter Repka, he founded the poetry group Osamelí bežci (Lonely Runners), and together they composed a manifesto celebrating “freedom of thought . . . individual responsibility and the rejection of communist dictatorship and censorship”—which  was subsequently banned. (For those interested in finding out more, a documentary titled Lonely Runners: Moving On!, directed by Martin Repka, was released in 2019 and focuses on the friendship of the three members.)

Štrpka’s priorities are embodied in his writing, which illuminates—in the words of poet and member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Katica Kulavkova—“everyday life . . . fragments [of] interpersonal relationships, the relationships between man and woman . . . individual and society . . . the physical and the emotional.” Kulavkova also notes that the “intimate, meditative, communicative . . . dimension” of Štrpka’s work is in many ways achieved via his poetic style, which she describes as “unpretentious [and] subtle” and “filled with detail.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Kenya, India, and México!

This week, our editors-at-large take us to India, Kenya, and México. From a cross-cultural poetry retreat to a crime writer’s conference, read on to find out more!

Réne Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from México

Not so long ago, I was talking with some friends about the Guadalajara International Book Fair and how, for many locals, an event like that was actually their only chance to find certain books, meet certain authors and even reflect upon their literary activities. Despite the importance of the Fair, literary circulation remains centralized in Mexico City, while book commercialization in other places like Guadalajara, Monterrey, or Oaxaca is always secondary.

This is why I find it important to celebrate events like the Yucatán International Reading Fair (FILEY), which will conclude this Sunday, March 30. This year, it has hosted important authors including Cristina Rivera Garza, Verónica Murguía, Brenda Lozano, Jorge Comensal, and Xita Rubert. At the Fair, the 2025 José Emilio Pacheco Award for Excellence in Literature was presented to Alberto Ruy Sánchez, a prolific novelist who, in his unique style, shared the reasons behind his writing:

I write to know, to explore vast dimensions of reality that only literature can penetrate. I also write to remember, but no less, I write to forget. I write to extend my body, my senses, to experience the sensuality of the world day after day. I write for pleasure, for desire, for rage. To expose the falsification of icons, the abuse of public power. I write to be hated and to be loved, more so, to be desired. I write to propose new spaces in this world, to create places.

As its name suggests, FILEY has also been a space to reflect on why, how, and from where we read, something essential if we want to address the problem of cultural centralization. As María Teresa Mézquita, the Fair’s director, said in her opening remarks at the festival, beyond numbers and sales, the event is driven by a desire to foster personal growth, learning, and a cultural environment enriched precisely through reading.

It is good, as Ruy Sánchez’s remarks suggest, to know why we write; just as important is knowing why we read.

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large reporting from Kenya READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Japan, Sweden, and Scotland!

This week, the Asymptote team takes us across the globe for updates on all things literature. From the inaugural launch of a book fair in Japan, to the appearance of a popular novelist and throat singer at a book festival in Sweden, to the commemoration of a prolific poet and dear friend in Scotland, read on to learn more.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Tomorrow, March 22, Kobe, Japan will see its first ever KOBE BOOK FAIR & MARKET, held on Rokkō Island with over sixty vendors, some bookish and some local food booths. While the majority of participating booksellers and publishers are based in the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan district, companies from across the country will amass tomorrow to promote literature and reading as part of the Kobe BOOK Culture Revitalization Project, created in response to the dwindling number of bookstores in recent years.

The fair will feature four panel events, including a tell-all on the nitty-gritty of running a bookstore and a deep dive into the production of local magazines. The former will bring together three booksellers working in markedly different environments: Tatsuya Isogami from toi books, a small local bookstore, Osamu Horiuchi from the gargantuan bookseller Junkudo, and Takashi Sesako from Page Pharmacy, a half-pharmacy-half-bookstore designed to encourage more random encounters with literature for his patients. The three will share the challenges and rewards of their respective environments and together ruminate on their role as booksellers. Later in the afternoon, Chief Editor of SAVVY and Meets Regional magazines Masaki Takemura will sit down with Youhei Sanjou of ORDINARY BOOKS to discuss the status of bookstores in the Kansai region and the intricacies of editing a magazine rooted in local life. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Egypt!

This week, our editors report on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a profound new collaboration drawing attention to the “obliteration” in Gaza, and a movement highlighting women writers and creators in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Last month, the six-book shortlist for the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was announced at a press conference held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. The honored books includes two authors previously recognized by the prize: Azher Jirjees, shortlisted in 2023 for The Stone of Happiness after being longlisted in 2020, and Taissier Khalaf, longlisted in 2017 for The Slaughter of the Philosophers. Ahmed Fal Al Din, Mohamed Samir Nada, Nadia Najar, and Haneen Al-Sayegh are first-time IPAF nominees.

The shortlist for this eighteenth edition of the IPAF was revealed by this year’s Chair of Judges, Egyptian academic Mona Baker. She was joined by fellow judges—Moroccan academic and critic Said Bengrad, Emirati critic and academic Maryam Al Hashimi, Lebanese researcher and academic Bilal Orfali, and Finnish translator Sampsa Peltonen—as well as IPAF Chair of Trustees Professor Yasir Suleiman, Prize Administrator Fleur Montanaro, and Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Professor Ahmed Zayed. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from the Philippines to the United States for updates on literature around the globe. From an eclectic and exciting annual book festival to the grand re-opening of a local queer-owned bookstore, read on to learn more. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

The 2025 Philippine Book Festival (PBF) is set to take place from March 13-16 in SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall in Mandaluyong City of the country’s capital region.

While I’m particularly excited to dive into Ang Propeta (Southern Voices, 2023), Layla Perez’s Filipino translation of Kahlil Gibran’s book of prose poems, The Prophet, the 2025 PBF lineup offers something for every participant: a cosplay event of characters from Philippine literature, panel discussions of contemporary queer and women writers, and a book talk on graphic novelist M.A. del Rosario’s Gods of Manila. The festival’s itinerary also includes a crime fiction panel, workshops on zine-making, book illustration, and writing in Baybayin (the script used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Luzon), and sessions on pitching stories to filmmakers (led by studios Gushcloud Philippines and J Creative Entertainment). Festival-goers can enjoy a poetry slam, a Balagtasan (Filipino debate using rhymed verse), and book talks with authors of boys’ love (BL) and girls’ love (GL) fiction.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Kenya, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on clashes between writers and politics, recent awards, and exciting events. From Pippi Longstocking’s 80th birthday to a brand-new book fair, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Venko Andonovski was recently named the most influential writer and educator of 2024 by TRI, the renowned, Skopje-based publishing house. Andonovski, whose novels and plays have been translated into twelve languages, is known as “the most widely read Macedonian writer and the most performed Macedonian novelist in the last twenty years.” Despite his fame, he is generous with both the public and his colleagues: he taught six writing workshops in 2024 and made a statement congratulating fellow Macedonian author Rumena Bužarovska on being named TRI’s most-read author of 2024, and condemning the “culture of silence” surrounding the accomplishments of domestic authors in the same breath. Andonovski termed the disinterest demonstrated by Macedonian politicians towards the literary scene “an embarrassment”, adding that the situation is exacerbated by authors who are equally silent about their colleagues’ attainments, and whose “bodies are 80% water and souls are 80% vanity.” Adding that “if we remain a culture of silence, our culture is bound to remain in silence [on the world stage]”, Andonovski posed a question that is both incisive and (unfortunately) relevant: “If we do not appreciate ourselves, who will appreciate us?” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Our editors bring you the latest from India, Mexico, and Romanian letters.

A vital new project to resurrect the works of a great Romanian poet in the English language, a slew of ambitious and global-minded book festivals in India, and a fair to highlight Oaxacan writing and languages in Mexico—our editors are bringing you the latest from a literary landscape that continues to expand in richness, variety, and intercultural exange.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

In 1889, Mihai Eminescu—the iconic late romantic/early modernist Romanian poet—died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind only one published collection but tens of thousands of unreleased manuscripts. As they were gradually unearthed and released over the decades following his death, the posthumous publications only increased Eminescu’s fame and critical acclaim. Despite this unparalleled stature in Romanian literary history, however, the poet is relatively unknown to English-language readers—an issue that paradoxically has nothing to do with a lack of translations. In fact, a sizeable portion of Romanian and Anglophone translators and writers have tried their hand at this hugely demanding task, but they’ve all largely failed in two essential respects (to smaller or larger extents): first, in rendering the oceanic vastness and depth of the oeuvre, and, second, in capturing the exquisite euphony to an extent by which a non-Romanian reader could sense the original’s inescapable fascination.

One of the most important recent events in Romanian letters has now set out to address both those shortcomings in a spectacular fashion; K.V. Twain (Diana Cârligeanu’s pen-name), a young poet, writer, and translator educated in the US and Japan, has undertaken the task of translating Eminescu’s collected poems in an eight-volume series to be published by Eikon Press, and the first instalment was launched in January under the aegis of the Romanian Literary Translators Association in Bucharest. The association’s director, multilingual poet and performer Peter Sragher, was the event’s enthusiastic host, while literary critics Christian Crăciun and Vianu Mureșan contributed generous praise for the project.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Dispatches on the latest in literature from Palestine, Sweden, and Colombia!

In this week’s roundup, from Palestine is a report on the recent raid of a Palestinian bookstore in Jerusalem; from Sweden, the nominees for a prestigious literary award; and from Latin America, coverage of the most recent edition of the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a striking escalation of censorship and cultural suppression, the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem—a revered institution for intellectual exchange and a cultural cornerstone for Palestinians—was the target of an Israeli police raid. Exactly three years ago (read the AWS dispatch here), this gem on Salah al-Deen al-Ayoubi street was celebrated for its role in publishing the first-ever Arabic edition of Granta, titled “Escape.” Today, however, the narrative has shifted from escape to arrest.

READ MORE…