During the January 2021 pro-Navalny demonstrations that swept Russia, hundreds of protestors were rounded up, brutalized, and jailed. Some of them ended up in the Sakharovo Detention Center for Foreign…

Born in a small town in northern Indiana in 1971, Sofia Samatar is the author of the forthcoming memoir The White Mosque (Catapult Books, 2022). Her first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, for which she…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

In the wake of the anti-extradition protests in 2019 and the implementation of the National Security Law in June 2020, Hong Kong—and, consequently, its literature—has increasingly been in…

I don’t live (t)here, but it lives in me still.

In 2019, translator Hannah Kauders stumbled on a copy of Las Biuty Queens, the second book of short stories by Chilean writer Iván Monalisa Ojeda, and fell in love. Kauders immediately set out…

Among the many online literary and arts journals published in India, हाकारा । hākārā occupies a rather unique position, embedded in a strong linguistic…

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

Last month, literary translator Nicholas Glastonbury, who translates from Turkish and Kurdish, posted a Twitter thread about the failings of the publishing industry when it comes to translated literature.…

There were always spies coming to attend our events.

In this interview, translators Jenna Tang and May Huang discuss their experiences translating contemporary literature in Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Their conversation touches on the diversity…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

I met Sarah Booker virtually in 2018 when she spoke with a graduate student reading group about translating Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest. During her virtual visit, Booker…

Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning literary translator from French to English. She recently translated Consent, Vanessa Springora’s memoir of her teenage relationship with the writer Gabriel Matzneff,…

I love this city against my own better judgment.

WWB's March issue features writing from Galicia, an autonomous region of northwestern Spain that borders Portugal. Though the Galician language shares a common root with modern Portuguese, Galicia's…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

I’m always a bit shattered by Athens.

In the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, classmates Kyra Ho and Maria Goikhberg created In Another Voice, a podcast dedicated to poetry in translation. In less than a year, they have…

This month’s issue of Words Without Borders is graced by the art of Galician muralist Joseba Muruzábal, also known as Yoseba MP. The piece, Leiterofilia II, is one of a series of…

From 1998 until January 2021, Professor Thomas C. Spear edited Île en île, an extensive virtual archive of literature from French-speaking islands and their diasporas. Although there will…

Born in Jerusalem, Najwan Darwish published his first poetry collection in 2000. He has since become one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets, and one of the most powerful poetic voices to emerge from…

Dig anywhere in the city and you collide with history.

The precocious seven-year-old protagonist of María José Ferrada’s picaresque novel How to Order the Universe, referred to simply as “M,” is one of the most astute, enchanting,…

In Evgeny Vodolazkin’s literary universe, time is always out of joint. His novels feature medieval wanderers who glimpse events centuries in the future, narrative structures that contrast vastly…

It seems to me—perhaps naively—that poetry has the ability to examine things in a maximally authentic way.

Tunisia’s experience with despotism and revolution is universal.

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

Today WWB concludes its series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem seek to develop and practice a translation-centric approach…

Its name, “the city of thousands,” is synonymous with multitude.

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

The desert is the shoulder of the city.

Oxford is one hidden city layered over another.

Doek! Literary Magazine, Namibia’s first online literary magazine, was named Brittle Paper's Literary Platform of the Year on Monday. It was founded in 2019 by Rémy…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

Naples is the city of a hundred cities, of a hundred satellites all orbiting the unique, massive planet that is memory.

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

The city has devoured itself over and over again.

They’ve read and admired one another for ages, but they’d never had an occasion to talk to each other. Emmanuel Carrère and Daniel Mendelsohn are among those writers who, over the past…

When Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon.ca First Novel Award (formerly the Books in Canada First Novel Award), it was the first translated novel selected in the prize’s…

Tang Fei (the pen name of Wang Jing) was born in 1983 in Shanghai. She is well known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy and is also a literary critic and essayist. Tang Fei was one of our star…

Athens is about instant decisions, constant change, boldness and confusion and nerve.

“Birds in Flight, 1965” by Enrique Villasis, translated from Filipino by Bernard Capinpin, was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented…

Lebanese comics artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj first appeared in Words Without Borders in February 2008, in our second graphic novel issue. Since then he’s contributed six more pieces, most recently…

“Trial Run” by Yau Ching, translated from Chinese by Chenxin Jiang, was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership with the Academy…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

Bryan Mendoza’s translation of Julio Pazos Barrera's “Pegasus Autopsy” was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership…

London is a self-enclosed world that contains all worlds.

Making texts that are potentially wrong or slippery keeps me heedful of officious frames of correctness.

Carlos Fonseca's Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a singularly difficult book to describe. It’s always hard to sum up an entire novel in a few words, but this one…

September is World Kid Lit Month—a celebration of translated literature for young people. We invited World Kid Lit advocate and children’s book translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp to tell us about…

Damián Cabrera is a Paraguayan writer, researcher, teacher, cultural manager, and curator. He is the author of the lyric novels Xirú (2012) and Xé (2019). He lives…

Usually there is no time to be moody, only the slap and the dash and the drill and the dig, you dig?

Even if Salerno is blessed with sunshine, many things happen in the twilight.

Car horns suddenly transformed into instruments of emotion, sirens of mourning.

In the essay “The Poem as a Field of Action,” presented as a lecture at the University of Washington in 1948, William Carlos Williams argues that after the Industrial Revolution, a different…

Something is always about to happen.

 WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different,…