A poem by Sinan Antoon, published in Al-quds, 21 October 2023, and in its English translation by Sinan Antoon, published by Words Without Borders on November 14th 2023
Afterwords
[For Gaza’s children]

A review in The Economist, published on July 13th 2023
Khaled khalifa, a Syrian writer, lives in Damascus even though state authorities have banned his books and, on one occasion, beaten him up. His previous novel, “Death Is Hard Work”, dealt with the carnage of his country’s civil war, which began in 2011. “No One Prayed Over Their Graves”, a family saga, takes place in and around Aleppo, a historic city ruined by that conflict. The novel, which covers the period between 1881 and 1951, tells the multigenerational story of two …

Khaled Khalifa, in an interview with Michael Safi for The Guardian, July 1, 2023 about his new book, ‘No One Prayed Over Their Graves’
The award-winning Syrian novelist on Aleppo, the city of his ‘soul’, his fascination with the late 19th century, and his youthful introduction to Chekhov.
While Khalifa was writing his new book, No One Prayed Over Their Graves, Aleppo was comprehensively destroyed in fighting between the Syrian government and rebels. His work is banned in Syria.

A million lives later, I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country, Iraq
Sinan Antoon, for The Guardian, March 19th, 2023
In early 2003, I was living in Cairo and carrying out research for my doctoral dissertation on a famous Iraqi poet who lived in my hometown, Baghdad, in the 10th century. But I was increasingly anxious about the Baghdad of the 21st century.

 
Interview by Will Forrester for PEN Transmissions, December 8, 2021
I think that if I could go back to those days, I would do the same thing all over again. I never regret going back to Syria – being there at the frontline, and in the middle of the war – nor do I regret leaving.I always tried to stay alive, but with my personal condition I had to do what needed to be done, despite the fear. By that token, in returning and sharing in death and people’s pain, through my …

By Tahmina Begum, for Al Araby, February 19, 2021
Usually, when you open up a book, which begins with a letter, you presume that the answer is hidden somewhere in the pages. Instead what you get with Voices of The Lost, is a sense of ambiguity and a human chain revealing that we’re all much more similar than we recognise. That we see our stories inside one another, even those whose circumstances on the surface seem opposing to ours.