Why Do You Dance When You Walk? is Abdourahman Waberi’s most autobiographical work to date. Poet, novelist and essayist, his earlier stories and novels bring to life the story of his homeland, the former French colony of Djibouti. This tiny country of the Horn of Africa is roughly the same size as South West England, but its strategic position near the Red Sea and the world’s busiest shipping routes offers it a major strategic significance disproportionate to its smallness. A polyglot nation, its cultures and traditions are rooted in cosmopolitanism.
Tag: books in translation
News | Celebrating Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, 7pm 18 January 2023, Irish Cultural Centre, London
A celebration of 25 years of Banipal Magazine translating and publishing contemporary Arab literature in English is being held at 7pm on Wednesday 18 January 2023 at the Irish Cultural Centre 5 Black’s Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9DT.
All are welcome however registration by way of an RSVP to the editors of Banipal Magazine via this webpage is essential in order to be included on the Guest List and gain entry. Continue reading News | Celebrating Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, 7pm 18 January 2023, Irish Cultural Centre, London
Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Take Six: Six Spanish Women Writers, (eds) Simon Deefholts & Kathryn Phillips-Miles | Dedalus Books
This welcome collection contains twenty-seven short stories by six influential Spanish women writers, written over the past one hundred and twenty years. The translations are fluent and easily readable, the editing ‘light-touch’ and unobtrusive.
One surprising feature of the stories is the constancy of the themes they address. The stories concentrate on marginalized, frustrated women, their lives stunted by male prejudice and violence. While the formats change, the key issues remain.
2022 in Review (part 2): Fiction and Nonfiction from 5 Indie Presses, Andrey Kurkov & The Children’s BookShow
Lack of time has meant that mastering the TBR&R pile has been a frustrating challenge this year. Many fantastic books have been published in 2022 by independent trade publishers championed via The BookBlast Diary over the years. The intermittent support is mightily appreciated of a couple of donors who stepped into the breach when official funding organizations turned us down not once but three times – apparently due to form filling-errors on our part, and our being based in London as opposed to the regions. Titles which caught the eye in 2022, listed in order of publication month, include:
LES FUGITIVES | The Child Who, Jeanne Benameur. Translated by Bill Johnston | 136pp 
May 2022 ISBN 978-1838490423
“In your head of a child there are sudden bright skies wrested from a low, lingering, unfathomable sadness. Your mother has disappeared. Never mind that she was never entirely present, it was her smell, her warmth, her silent hands, that you relied on to feel that you truly existed.”
2022 in Review (part 1): Annie Ernaux, Olivier Guez, Empire Windrush & more
What an odd post-pandemic year 2022 has been, deranged in so many ways, over and beyond the realities of Brexit hitting home, and the depressing normalization of exploitation by the Government and giant corporates across the board, as we enter “a different kind of recession where there are still lots of jobs but the recession is around our wages,” according to James Reed.
Continue reading 2022 in Review (part 1): Annie Ernaux, Olivier Guez, Empire Windrush & more