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Our Translating Palestine program was livestreamed on October 21st, 2022. Here are the four recorded conversations:  1. Translators and critics Marcia Lynx Qualey, Sawad Hussain and Alice Yousef discuss the challenges of writing, editing, translating and publishing Palestinian literature.    2. Jehan Bseiso speaks with Maya Abu Al-Hayyat about her latest volume of poetry "You Can Be The Last Leaf" translated into the English by Fady Joudah (2022, Milkweed Press). 3. Meg Arenberg speaks to writer Sonia Nimr and translator Marcia Lynx Qualey about the translation, editing and publication of Thunderbird, Nimr's speculative fiction trilogy.   4. Suchitra Vijayan and Louis Allday celebrate the...

Our manifesto was published by Africa is a Country on June 26th, 2022. Read it here or on their website.  This is an unprecedented time for the world of books and publishing, with an extraordinary number of books being published worldwide. Not only was the panic that a digital revolution would spell the end of books pretty short-lived but people are actually buying more books than ever. It is hard to say whether this is due to greedy behemoths like Amazon or the proliferation of book-related content on online platforms, local reading groups, and celebrity book clubs. But the excitement...

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's podcast offered startling and provocative insights on a variety of topics. Perhaps the most surprising was when Makumbi compared African writing and stories to cotton and coffee that is packaged into Western forms and consumed in the West. Here's the full explosive excerpt. (It has been edited for clarity.) Bhakti Shringarpure: You've spoken about being an Ugandan writer who is being published in the UK and what you observed about audiences and readerships, and what you're calling the "decentering" of readerships. You said something important about the ways in which histories of the empire have made it such...

On March 25, 2022, Radical Books Collective organized a panel titled ‘How To Write About War’ to intervene in the moral and political crisis around the writing, reporting, representing and filming of war.  The event featured Bhakti Shringarpure, Suchitra Vijayan, Nadifa Mohamed and Billy Kahora. Panelists started with the discussion on the egregious coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine being described as the third world war. The conversation started by trying to expand and understand the challenges of representation, narrations and complex valences of the term "war." Vijayan noted that we have had the war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. Despite the overwhelming evidence...