Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry, a comic book, and two volumes on postcolonial theory. He is acclaimed for his bold style and unique narrative voice, and often experiments with the boundaries of short fiction and prose poetry.
Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of postcolonial modernity in the Arab world. His work has been described as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and it has been said that he combines “an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change.” Hisham’s fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in journals and anthologies including the Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, The Best Asian Short Stories, and The Radiance of the Short Story: Fiction from Around the Globe among other anthologies. The U.K.-based cultural webzine The Culture Trip listed him as one of Jordan’s top six contemporary writers, and his book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Hisham is the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship for Artists and Writers for 2017, and his most recent book in translation, The Monotonous Chaos of Existence, was published in 2022 by Mason Jar Press.
