It’s a rare pleasure to be celebrating Marcia Lynx Qualey, to present her with the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, and to have the opportunity to say a few words about Marcia and the vital work she does.

For as long as there’s been literature in Arabic, there have been poems of praise, known as madh, and on being asked to make these remarks today I was half-tempted to compose an ode to Marcia in that vein. I would have paid tribute, as is customary in such poems, to Marcia’s generosity and valiance as well as her riding skills and her prowess in battle; I would have compared her to various evergreen desert plants; and I would have declared our hosts at Words Without Borders to be more brilliant than the sun, since their splendor continues even at night. But Marcia, I know, has little time for pomp and cant, so instead I’ll just try very simply to express what her work has meant to me and to countless others.

Dear Marcia, we’ve yet to meet, at least at the time that I write this, but it’s a sign of your generosity of spirit, your willingness to give of yourself, that I have always felt close to you. I began reading your blog, ArabLit, shortly after you founded it in 2009. I was at university at the time, studying Arabic, not yet knowing how central this language and literature would become in my life. Your work was an education, a companion to what I encountered in the classroom, and also a corrective to it. I sometimes felt in college that I was being taught a dead language, that the antiquated translations I was reading had little to do with the Arabic texts that moved and excited me so much on the page, or indeed with the lively Arabic I heard and spoke at home. You stepped into that space between books and the people who make them. You showed those of us who loved what we read that we were not alone, that literature was also a living community and a conversation. By highlighting the work of translators, solitary and scattered as they were, you created a space into which others could venture. I have always translated, but without ArabLit I’m not sure I would have become a translator. You helped define what I was doing, and you believed in it before I did. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me over the years that you gave them a crucial boost as they were starting out. It made all the difference that someone was paying attention.

It’s been amazing to see ArabLit grow from a blog into a constellation of print, online and audio projects, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with you several times, but it’s our first encounter that comes back to me now. I first made contact with you in 2013, freshly graduated and keen to contribute a review. You wrote back straight away, with what I now see as your distinctive blend of sweetness and saltiness, waving aside my overly formal approach and welcoming me in warmly but without further ceremony. I filed the piece, a little late; “life,” I explained, had gotten in the way. You understood, you said, since you had one of those “pesky things” yourself.

Looking back at that first exchange, I realize that even then you were teaching me something: that language should not be used to obfuscate; that civility can get in the way of true connection; that work is not separate from life but wonderfully and messily woven in with it.

I recently heard the translator Jeffrey Zuckerman describe the act of translation as “opening a door.” I think this is what you do too, Marcia. You open doors: not just as a translator, but as a journalist, a reviewer, an advocate, an editor, a publisher, a podcaster, and a fiercely devoted champion of countless other writers and translators. At the London Book Fair in 2017 you were granted the Literary Translation Initiative Award for your “strong personal dedication to creating cross-cultural understanding in the diverse world of Arabic literature.” You’ve been described as a one-woman powerhouse, and everyone who knows you cannot fail to be impressed by the remarkable energy and warmth and sheer sense of purpose that drives you.

Three tributes among many, from people who know you better than I do:

The poet Olivia Elias: “What immediately struck me when I came to be in closer contact with Marcia is how deeply and seriously she gets involved when she commits to do something, paying attention to every little detail.”

The translator and writer Nariman Youssef: “I’ve never met anyone who worked so tirelessly and consistently while always downplaying their own efforts and lauding others for the smallest contribution. I’m delighted that, at last, Marcia is receiving some well-deserved recognition that she might just have to accept.”

The reporter and essayist Ursula Lindsey, your co-host on the Bulaq podcast: “When we talk about what we’re up to, Marcia invariably runs down a staggering, dizzying, ever-expanding list of projects she is involved with. Sometimes I gently suggest that she shouldn’t add more to her plate, and she agrees, but invariably she takes the work on anyway, because she just can’t say no to this one important project or lovely writer or wonderful book that deserves attention.”

There is much to admire in what you’ve built, and many of us are deeply in your debt. But I think what strikes me most is that you’ve created this indispensable structure and yet it doesn’t feel like an institution. It feels like a home, one with many doors, a table where more seats can always be found. The ArabLit website describes itself as “a crowd-funded collective,” and I think I’ve seen it described elsewhere as “a publishing cooperative.” It would have been easy, as the project grew, to take on the logic of an institution, to be more guarded, more careful. But you’re not made like that, thank God. To quote a writer we both love, Jean Rhys: “Oh dear the middle way respectable ones—they can be the devil.”

ArabLit is now a team of people, but it is the way it is because of what you are like, Marcia: an open heart and a skeptical mind, always kind and at the same time wonderfully fierce and persistent in speaking out against prejudice or injustice. I happen to know that you have a special love for speculative fiction, fiction that presents us with other worlds, and that you also have a particular interest in literature for younger readers, an area you’ve described as being “huge, wild, fun, funny, and innovative.” Clearly you’re drawn to what might be, what we haven’t yet invented but might still be able to imagine, and it’s this curiosity about how else we might live that animates everything you do.

Among the many volumes you’ve translated from Arabic is a book of stories by Sonia Nimr called Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, which won the Palestine Book Award in 2021. Set hundreds of years ago, it follows the adventures of a young woman called Qamar, or Moon, from a mountain in Palestine across deserts and seas, telling tales all the while to survive. There’s a section in the book that takes place in Gaza, when Qamar glimpses the sea for the first time. In late October of last year, Marcia, you wrote: “Every time I think of Gaza I also think of Qamar’s journey there, how it was a place of respite and beauty. How it could be a place of respite and beauty.”

For those of us who make our lives in and around Arabic and of course for many others, the last eight months have been excruciating. I know I’m not alone in having doubted what literature can do when the very conditions of life are being annihilated. ArabLit has always been a space of celebration—indeed, a place of respite and beauty—and in the last eight months it has also become a space to grieve, to record, and to remember. The latest issue of ArabLit Quarterly, the beautiful magazine you’ve been publishing for six years now, is devoted to Gaza. It was co-edited with Mohammed Zaqzouq and Mahmoud al-Shaer, who are both in Gaza now and, on the day the issue was launched, were fleeing Rafah in fear for their lives ahead of the Israeli invasion. “In this issue,” they write, “we share poems, testimonies, articles and reflections on the ongoing war, hoping that these texts and experiences create an opportunity, however small, for survival. Because we believe that every attempt at expression is an attempt to survive.”

Dear Marcia, we’ve yet to meet, but by the time I speak these words to you we will have met. What a strange and fantastical technology writing is, that it allows us to speak across time in this way. If I know anything about you, it is your belief that it is possible to speak to each other across all kinds of distance. That what matters is not where you come from but where you stand and what you do and who you choose to love. The news that you’d been granted this award was a break in the cloud, an oasis in the darkest season, and was met with an outpouring of excitement and acclaim around the world. “A celebration of Marcia,” wrote the scholar and translator Huda Fakhreddine, “is a celebration of all the voices she lifts and the talents she encourages.” Of all the responses—all the songs of praise—the one that resonates most deeply is also the briefest, two words by the poet Fady Joudah, who simply said: “Love wins.”

Congratulations, Marcia, and thank you for everything.