Death Will Come in a Single Reckoning: An Interview with Oisín Breen on the Irish Avant-Garde

June 4, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost. . .

Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.

Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.

 In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?

Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.

My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.

I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Park Ju-taek

June 3, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Heinz Insu Fenkl

In the night, all arustle with flights of falling leaves, / the wind opens its mouth to read my eulogy / and blows my will away.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we’re presenting two highly evocative poems by Korean poet Park Ju-taek. The first, “Missteps”, portrays a group of men, “hard as insomniac stones”, whose fragile companionship seems to be threatened by an overwhelming yet nebulous existential dread. “I Am Not an Atheist” forcefully buffets us with its speaker’s emotional turmoil; a hyperawareness of “the cyanic death that comes with mortality” provokes a confrontation with the divine. But the poems escape clear interpretation, and perhaps feel most similar to paintings—the mysterious cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper come to mind. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s sensuously renders Park’s distinctive atmospheres, bringing his unsettling afterimages into high relief.

Missteps

No one kept track of the time.
The men who needed a long talk did not return to their homes.
A car drove by, its headlights on.
And then—those men of few words—disappeared into a bar;
a brief silence settled in.
It was a starless night,
our natures hard as insomniac stones
and tainted, just like the world.
One man stepped out of the bar,
and as he walked along the visible street—
the dark street, with its open lips—
he saw shadows still trapped in the bar
and insects dead on the cement floor.
The wind blew. The remaining men all rose.
Afterwards, darkness engulfed
the street toward which they walked,
their many hands fluttering in the air.

READ MORE…

Thinking through Labour: A Review of The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati 

June 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

Fortunati sweeps us into understanding the re/production economies of the housewives, the prostitutes, and the workers.

The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati, translated from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, Verso, 2025

Earlier this year, Indian Twitter spiralled into a full-blown meltdown after Mrs., the Hindi remake of the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, was released pan-India on the streaming platform Zee5. The film provides a picture of the world of Richa, a well-educated woman who recedes into the drudgery of housework; after marriage, her dreams and desires suffocated. I could not bring myself to watch the film, but I devoured the reviews. Many hailed the movie for its realistic rage against the patriarchy, but the bones of contention that the audience picked with the film were many. One Twitter user casually remarked that if the husband is the breadwinner, the least one may expect from the wife is to do the household chores. Reading these reviews and blithe takes, I was livid, and I could not quite put a finger on why.

I found the answer, cosmologically-willed, in Leopoldina Fortunati’s work L’arcano della riproduzione (first published in 1981), rendered into English by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono as The Arcana of Reproduction. Fortunati was a key member of Lotta Femminista, initially called Movimento di Lotta Femminile (Women’s Struggle Movement), and then finally Movimento dei Gruppi e Comitati per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Movement of Groups and Committees for Wages for Housework). English-speaking countries are more familiar with its alternative name: the network of Wages for Housework. As the name suggests, the international movement had a militant and anti-capitalist dimension, and its goal to secure pay for housework aligned much with the struggles for wages that were playing out in factories and universities at large. Together with companions Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, she wrote texts that reflected the movement’s goals and ideology; her Arcana of Reproduction emerged from these reflections. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 30, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from India, Bulgaria, and Mexico!

This week, our editors-at-large interview an Indian translator to better understand the local impact of international prizes, report on the opening of an Umberto Eco-inspired bookstore in Bulgaria, and celebrate a major 20th-century writer in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kolkata

The literary community in India has been celebrating this week because Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize. This marks the second time that a book translated from an Indian language has received this prestigious award. The first was Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which won in 2022. Anton Hur, one of the judges this year, described Heart Lamp as “daring, textured, and vital.” I wanted to find out how the book has been received in the translation community in India, so I briefly spoke with Sayari Debnath, a culture journalist at Scroll and a translator from Bengali and Hindi to English.

I asked her how the translation of Heart Lamp stands out to her compared to other recently translated books in various Asian languages. Sayari mentioned that she was quite surprised by the translation when she first read the book. “There are plenty of phrases that were translated literally and Deepa Bhasthi chose to retain some of the Kannada words too,” she said. “It took some time to get used to but as I read on, I realised what it was doing to my own tongue – there was a “chataak” in the language, or what one could also call spice/sourness/pungency. My mouth was imbued with a flavour I couldn’t really place. I thought that was quite an interesting feeling. However, I did tell Deepa that at first, I wasn’t sure about what she was trying to do. She told me she ‘translated with an accent’ — that’s new, I think.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler

May 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Gänsler compellingly blurs the lines between heroine and villain, as well as between compassion and self-preservation. . .

The still-young genre of climate fiction—or ‘cli-fi’—dreams of inspiring change, yet critics have pointed out that its overwhelmingly dystopian narratives are more likely to trigger paralysis or apathy; if we’re doomed, what’s the point? Within this contemporary affliction of passivity, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer juxtaposes its burning world with a potent human story of choice, stasis, and compassions, cementing its varied cast in an unmistakably contemporary mode, yet with the same ethical conundrums that have confounded us since time immemorial. The sheer breadth of our current problems can wither us into an insular complacency, but Gänsler powerfully points us towards the matter of our freedom. We’re delighted to present this timely novel as our Book Club selection for the month of May—it’s a hot one.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, Other Press, 2025

Once upon a time, the promise of an eternal summer may have seemed idyllic. In the popular imagination, the season has so often signified carefree vacations, sandy shores and glittering waters, balmy nights and languid mornings, the well-deserved time-out from a life of hard work or study. But it’s 2025. Summers have become increasingly hot. And long. And dry. I can vividly remember the eerie smog and the smell of smoke in the air as the 2019-20 bushfires raged across the southeast of Australia; even though I was hundreds of kilometres from any active fires, I had my first, pre-COVID experience of donning a mask for daily activities. Holidays were cancelled. New Year’s celebrations abandoned. Beach towns evacuated. This is the summer of our times—and sometimes even winter, too; just this January, southern California saw wildfires spreading into urban areas, decimating homes and taking lives and livelihoods, while less well-publicised infernos have also blazed through parts of South Korea and South Africa.

Somewhere in what seems to be Bavaria, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer is sweltering a few years from now, in a future where the climate target of a 1.5°C threshold is no longer a goal even for activists. It’s October, and an empty spa resort is being threatened by the fires raging through the nearby conifer forests for the fifth or sixth year in a row. It all seems hard to keep track for Iris, who is living out her own lonely summer days in this hotel that she inherited, sunbathing and checking the latest weather warnings—but only when the situation isn’t so dire that they’re played over roaming loudspeakers: ‘Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home.’ Although she’s aware of the danger and trusts the climate science, her physical and economic precarity—hotel bookings are no longer allowed, even if anyone actually wanted to take the waters in this water-restricted spa town—are not enough for Iris to leave. She has no one and nowhere to go to. READ MORE…

The 2025 Turin International Book Fair: Going the Distance

May 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe. . .

Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.

This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.

Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Good Girls” by Olga Campofreda

May 27, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Federica Silvi

That ... is how snakes leave their old skins behind: they crawl out of their nest and keep rubbing against the ground, until they’re finally free.

For this Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant and introspective excerpt from Olga Campofreda’s novel Ragazze Perbene, translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi. A woman returns to her hometown for a simple mission: attending her cousin’s wedding. But her journey provokes uneasy reflections, as she tracks the trajectory of her cousin’s life, which has adhered to the conventional “good girl” narrative ingrained in their community, and measures its distance from her own. As much as she cherishes her life of openness and freedom, her homecoming resurrects the ghosts of other possibilities—and worse, the fear of not being able to maintain her new identity under the suffocating pressure of the past. Campofreda’s prose brims with quiet tension, exploring the friction between the selves we create for ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.

In the end, no one cheered. The plane glimmered in the sunset-red windows of the business district’s skyscrapers, then landed smoothly in Naples, but none of the usual hand-clapping followed. A single, half-hearted burst had all but died down by the time the wheels touched the ground. Some might blame it on the low season: at this time of year, all the passengers are foreigners, taking advantage of lower prices to visit the islands and hike on the Amalfi Coast. It’s the outfits that give them away, the summer clothes they start wearing before it’s even hot, the shorts and linen vests they bring out as good omens for the weather in the days to come. In the holiday dream world they purchased, there’s nothing but sunshine. They’ll find it even when it eludes them: a power they can only wield in the places they’re seeing for the first time.

“Are you from here?” the delicate woman sitting next to me asked, in English.  

Her husband had woken her when Vesuvius appeared out of the window. She kept pressing her finger on the glass in its direction, ecstatic, a white-haired child. 

“Are you from Naples?”

I nodded; she replied with a contented sigh, then turned away to gape at the scenery some more.   READ MORE…

Translating Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist: An Interview with Avery Fischer Udagawa

May 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

Beyond the editorial trappings and packaging, however, the best stories ignore borders. . .

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist is a moving and fantastical story of a young girl’s burgeoning independence, taking place in a strange village nicknamed Absurd Avenue. Kashiwaba is a prolific author of children’s literature in Japanese, with her oeuvre ranging from the grounded and slightly magical to the utmost heights of imagination—but embedded alike with a deep emotional resonance. Widely read by both children and adults, The Village Beyond the Mist in particular has had a global effect as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and Avery Fischer Udagawa’s English translation now renews this magical book for US readers.

Udagawa’s repertoire of translations contains a number of Kashiwaba’s works, including Temple Alley Summer (2021) and The House of the Lost on the Cape (2023), both from Restless Books. In the following conversation, we discussed Kashiwaba’s influential body of children’s literature and Udagawa’s thought process while working on The Village Beyond the Mist.

Bella Creel (BC): You’ve translated a number of works by Sachiko Kashiwaba, from short stories to three full-length novels. From what I’ve read in your translations, it seems that her works, while often fantastical, remain grounded in real-life challenges—coming of age, the loss of a loved one, or the relationship between parent and child. How would you describe Kashiwaba as an author—what seems to drive her writing?

Avery Fischer Udagawa (AU): Sachiko Kashiwaba’s work seems to well up from both a deep love of Japanese storytelling and a vast knowledge of European and North American children’s literature, gained through a voracious reading of translations that began in childhood. Her works refer in form or content to a wide range of sources, from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to L. M. Montgomery to the Tōno monogatari, the collected folklore of the Tōno region in her native prefecture of Iwate. The afterword to her debut novel mentions The Chronicles of Narnia and Mary Poppins—before going on to thank the father of Japanese fantasy, Satoru Satō.

She has said that she hopes above all for readers to enjoy reading her books, finishing them and saying, “ah, that was fun.” But I have only to flip through her long-running Monster Hotel series—featuring a vampire and witches alongside a partially shifted kitsune (fox) girl and a rokurokubi (long-necked spirit)—to see how she relishes braiding the traditions she grew up with.

Her concern for real children and families is also palpable, perhaps especially in work that she produced shortly after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, which affected Iwate. Her novel The House of the Lost on the Cape was first serialized in the city newspaper of Morioka, where she lives, for young readers who would have experienced grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt just like the characters in House. In the story, she marshals kappa river spirits, stone lion-dogs from a Kesennuma shrine, and a giant Jizō statue from near her own house to facilitate communal healing.

Virtually all of Kashiwaba’s stories feature insights about families, such as how a growing daughter and her father may suddenly find themselves talking less; in The Village Beyond the Mist, a shared knowledge of a place promises to be the key to reopening communication.

BC: Alongside your role as a teacher, you have also built a prolific career in the translation of children’s literature—how did you find this niche? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 23, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us into the inner workings of the literary scenes in Palestine and Kenya. From the debut of Gaza Publications, a publication dedicated to the promotion and protection of Palestinian stories, to the rich and discursive literary salons of Nairobi, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

A new publishing house, Gaza Publications (manshurat gazza), has been launched by Palestinian writer and editor Husam Maarouf, aiming to safeguard Palestinian narratives threatened by erasure amid ongoing conflict. Maarouf, speaking from Gaza, emphasized that the project was born out of “the fear of obliteration and the erasures that threaten the Palestinian story,” particularly the untold testimonies of those who lived through the 1948 Nakba and subsequent wars.

The Gaza Publications team includes Maarouf as founder and director, visual artist Lamis Al Sharif as consultant and coordinator, and Yemeni designer Nina Amer. Despite severe challenges—including war, frequent internet outages, and communication barriers—the team remains committed to amplifying Palestinian voices, especially those shaped by the harsh realities of Gaza.

READ MORE…

A Sacred Collaboration with Nature: An Interview with Natalia García Freire and Victor Meadowcroft

May 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something.

One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.

Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.

RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?

READ MORE…

Restoring Our Latent Desires and Capabilities: A Review of The Shadow of Words by Ana Blandiana

May 21, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Charles Altieri

[These poems] offer astonishing ways of capturing how language has broken through to our inner lives.

The Shadow of Words by Ana Blandiana, translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea, Bloodaxe Books, 2025

Before entering into Ana Blandiana’s The Shadow of Words, a compilation of the lauded poet’s early work, my first task must be to praise the lengthy introduction by the collection’s translators, Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea, in which they give a superbly lucid account of the intricate shifts in the poet’s sensibility in these beginning years, from 1964 to 1981. The overarching theme, they ascertain, is the various ways that Blandiana stages relations between the joys of intimate life and the political order that threatens them. It is fascinating how these poems elaborate variations on those attitudes.

A poet familiar with the realities of social life. Blandiana was banned from publishing in her native Romania at only seventeen years old, and prohibited from going to university because her father, an orthodox priest, was considered a political prisoner by the communist regime—leaving her labelled as “an enemy of the people.” Later in life, her rebellions against the Ceauşescu dictatorship led to further prohibitions against publication in 1985 and in 1988, with the latter lasting until the revolution of 1989. Such political and literary efforts have since led to her becoming a legendary figure in Romania, often seen as a Joan of Arc or a modern Cassandra—while in her literary oeuvre, she is comparable to writers like Vaclav Havel and Anna Akhmatova, whose work has become symbolic of a collective destiny.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Shin Kyeong-nim

May 20, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Shane Ingan

If a human shows any interest at all in pigs, / It’s to snatch one up at random for slaughter.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a selection of poems by Shin Kyeong-nim, translated from the Korean by Shane Ingan. In “For fallen things,” the speaker reflects on a life spent with the downtrodden, where “the shattered of dreams of fallen things” remain unredeemed. Accepting the bleakness of such a life brings a contentment that grand narratives could never give them. Meanwhile, “Lucky dream” follows a pig farmer who dreams of living as a pig herself. Though her porcine lifestyle would allow her new freedoms, she’s overwhelmed by the reality of the random violence that all dehumanized beings are vulnerable to. Both poems are suffused with quiet dignity as well as an acerbic undertone, which naturally intermingle among meditations on power, fate, and the unseen costs of collective indifference.

For fallen things

Somehow or other, I made my home in the shadows.
I did not take the side of the victorious wrestler,
But stood instead with the defeated, my fist in the air.
I skipped that rally where the multitudes gathered,
And listened instead to the man in the tattered suit
Surrounded by outcasts and orphans.
And so I have always been a bit melancholy, a bit mournful,
But I never thought of myself as unfortunate.
All that time I was happy.
It was the way people lived.

Never once did I believe that the shattered dreams of fallen things
Would be pieced back together by some benevolent hand.

READ MORE…

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the Art of Bearing Witness

May 19, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

These six translated works . . . demonstrate the formal innovation, thematic depth, and beauty of contemporary Arabic literature.

Since its conception nearly twenty years ago, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has sought to bring a wider scope of attention and celebration to works translated into English from the Arabic, resulting in a plethora of incredible titles being honored over the years, from the 2008 awarding of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah, to the 2019 awarding of Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work, translated by Leri Price. In this essay, Ibrahim Fawzy takes us across the most recent shortlist and its six works, discussing their distinct contributions to the Arab world’s abundant archive.

Contemporary Arabic literature offers rich, varied responses to the shared human experiences of displacement, conflict, and the weight of history. With its compelling and diverse array, the shortlist of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation presents a brilliant selection of such works each year, spanning genres from memoir to thriller, and reflecting the vitality and range of modern Arabic literary expression. In the 2024 prize, the six works on the shortlist—brought into English by dedicated translators—offer profound insights into the complexities of identity, memory, and resilience. While the judges ultimately awarded the prize to Katharine Halls’s translation of Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence early this year, every shortlisted text invited comparative reflection on how these distinct narratives converge around the very act of bearing witness.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 16, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Zohra Salih

The latest from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors are introducing a generous new anthology that illuminates India’s capital, the winners of prestigious Swedish literary awards, and a feature of Hong Kong poets. Read on to find out more.

Zohra Salih, Editor at Large, reporting from India

It has been a harrowing week in this part of the world. We are still, very cautiously, coming to terms with the ceasefire that was finally declared to de-escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, the consequences of which have been disproportionately and brutally borne by the residents of occupied Kashmir (one of the most militarized zones in the world). Things are now supposedly returning to ‘normal’, yet the fact that war was blatantly invoked, justified, and celebrated by fellow citizens has created an atmosphere of unease around writing about India in its aftermath, to say the least.

If he were alive today, one person would have found the words to make something meaningful and urgent amidst this fog of madness: Saadat Hasan Manto. Born in India and forced to make a second life in the newly formed Pakistan, the fiery writer and chronicler of Bombay was considered prophetic for his stories that anticipated with stark-eyed clarity the savagery awaiting the two nations post-Partition, a decision he vehemently opposed. May 11 is the 113th anniversary of his birth, and there is no better time to return to his short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, or his collection Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, than now. Those in Mumbai have also been able to experience his stories—many of them excluded from the usual anthologies—as part of an audio theatre piece performed by Katha Khana at the iconic Prithvi theatre on May 13.

I would also be remiss to not mention The World With Its Mouth Open by another journalist turned author, Zahid Rafiq, which came out in December last year. Rafiq’s debut short story collection vividly and humanely renders the lives of the people of Kashmir as they go on with what has come to be called ordinary life, marked by precarity. There is a quietness to the writing that allows Rafiq to enter your mind and transport it to the valley, blocking out all the noise that obscures its image in the mainstream imagination. Needless to say, it is essential reading for the times we are living in today. READ MORE…