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Bringing a New Audience to Arabic Literature

Date: September 8, 2022, 17:00 - 18:00
Location: Virtual

In collaboration with American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), the Sheikh Zayed Book Award held a virtual panel discussion titled “Bringing a New Audience to Arabic Literature", hosting Michael Cooperson, SZBA 2021 Translation winner & Sawad Hussein, the 2022 translator in residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation. The discussion was moderated by Chip Rossetti, Editorial Director, Library of Arabic Literature.

The translators discussed the process by which they were able to write and publish their books, gain attention from the audience, and how other translators may take advantage of these opportunities to expand Arabic stories and culture to new English-speaking audiences.
 

 

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Speakers

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Speakers
Michael Cooperson

Michael Cooperson

An American author and translator, Cooperson studied at Harvard University and the American University of Cairo, and is currently a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published two monographs on early Abbasid cultural history: ‘Classical Arabic Biography’ and ‘Al-Ma'mun’. In addition to Impostures, he has translated Abdelfattah Kilito's ‘L'Auteur et ses doubles (The Author and his Doubles)’ and Ibn al-Jawzi's ‘Manaqib al-Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Virtues of the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal)’. His other interests include Maltese language and culture.
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Speakers
Sawad Hussain

Sawad Hussain

The winner of the 2019 Arablit Short Story Prize and two English PEN Translates awards. She co-teaches a workshop on translating Arabic comics at UK secondary schools via the collective Shadow Heroes. Her recent translations include resistance novella Passage to the Plaza (shortlisted for the 2020 Palestine Book Awards) and the groundbreaking experimental short fiction collection A Bed for the King's Daughter. She holds an MA in modern Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies.
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Moderator
Chip Rossetti

Chip Rossetti

Translator and the managing editor of the Library of Arabic Literature translation series at NYU Press. He has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature (specializing in modern Iraqi fiction) at the University of Pennsylvania, and did his undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin at Harvard. Before his second career in academia, he worked for a number of years as an acquiring editor at US publishers such as Basic Books, Wiley and Little, Brown. From 2005 to 2007, he was the senior editor at the American University in Cairo Press. His translations include Sonallah Ibrahim’s Beirut; Magdy El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro; Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s scifi novel Utopia; and Three Poems by Syrian poet Liwaa Yazji (with Samantha Kostmayer Sulaiman.) In 2010, he won a PEN America Translation Fund grant for his translation of Muhammad Makhzangi’s short story collection Animals in our Days

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