Publishers Weekly, November 28th, 2014
Ever since I started Interlink Publishing 30 years ago, I’ve been a passionate advocate of literature in translation. Literature is universal, and great literature travels well. It can thrive at home, in exile, and, yes, in translation. So why do translated titles make up less than 3% of books published annually in the U.S.? I asked this question when I participated in a panel discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.
But when I was invited to speak at the 2014 Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) …

In the spring of 2014, Ahmad Saadawi’s book Frankenstein in Baghdad was awarded the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the Arab Booker. It is a novel of a kind quite different from the ones generally acclaimed by the public or by critics, and from those that have come to me for consideration in the past few years. Whatever its originality or flaws, its being awarded the IPAF could be the sign of an interesting change to come.
 
As I celebrate this fall my tenth year as a literary …

I first thought of this project in a random conversation with Nadim Tarazi, a friend who owned my favorite bookshop in Beirut in the 1990s, and now runs “La Maison du livre”, association for book professionals. He was visiting Paris where I then lived. It was the winter of 2006. I had been a literary agent specialized in Arabic literature for two years, and was struggling to find independent information on books. This is where the realization of a need for more information on Arab books, as well as for quality standards, stemmed from.

The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize was launched in 2010 as part of Harvill Secker’s centenary celebrations. It is an annual prize, which focuses on a different language each year, with the aim of recognising the achievements of young translators at the start of their careers. This year’s chosen language is Arabic.

2012 is the 6th edition of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
The call for applications is now open, and the deadline is September 1st 2011.

It was the final day of the fourth Palestine Festival of Literature and I knew it was going to be a long day.

I’m a student volunteer at the festival, and the closing event was to take place in the Silwan Solidarity Tent – a public meeting point in a deeply threatened neighbourhood of my city, Jerusalem – with more than twenty writers from all over the world.