For years, I’ve been asked, “Why do you not write in Kurdish?”

The news of her arrest changed the metaphysical condition of my geography: I found myself, suddenly, in exile.

In this introduction to our collection of writing from the Francophone Pacific, Jean Anderson advocates for a view of the region that encompasses both its linguistic diversity and its interconnectedness.

Yasmine Seale lauded Marcia Lynx Qualey, the winner of the 2024 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, at an in-person ceremony in New York on June 4, 2024.

On June 4th, Marcia Lynx Qualey accepted the 2024 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature at a ceremony in New York.

The translators of the four stories in the Matrilineal collection consider matriarchal influence and the uncanny power of feminine inheritance.

Between 1975 and 1980, around 300,000 Surinamese—nearly half of the population—seized the opportunity and left for the Netherlands. Among them was my father.

More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.

How is it possible that a place you haven’t seen for decades can match your memory when you finally visit it?

The autumn moon is a common motif within Chinese poetry, shining often upon geographies of homesickness and longing.

Aimé Césaire is essential to the way I understand myself and my work in the world.

“Silencing the story, in other words, has always been a means of silencing history.

Books stand as a material resistance to dangerous, accelerating erasures of home, culture, language, art,” writes Preti Taneja.

The substance of Wittgenstein’s theories in the Tractatus is intimately tied to a vision of lan­guage that, among other problems, tends to produce bad translations.

Hannah Allen-Shim takes us on a tour of Quebec’s science fiction and fantasy scene, from its beginnings in the 1970s to its expansion and diversification in recent years.

For Refaat, teaching was more than just a job; it was a dynamic and transformative experience for himself and for his students.

For as long as Palestinians have resisted their occupiers, a companion narrative questioning our very existence, a profoundly dehumanizing narrative rooted in the West’s still unexamined anti-Arab racism, has also thrived, writes Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Errant translation may take the form of performance, at any time or place. Such translations are difficult to see, publish, or police.

Could a Black man really have become a knight of the Order of Santiago?

Literature, storytelling, and fiction in particular can actually perform simple miracles.

Read coverage of WWB in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more.

I find myself moved by these evenings at the zoo.

At the end of the twenty-second century and in the midst of the explosion of what people across many parts of the world spontaneously began to refer to as “collective earth aesthetics,” it is perhaps disconcerting to return to a discussion of art and…

New incarnations of resistance are forming and reforming every day, stronger than ever before, so I do not want to suggest that things are coming to an end for the Iranian people opposing the regime.

Femicide remains largely invisible in both academic literature and popular narratives in the United States. Why?

They were marching along a man with his hands tied behind his back and a tall paper hat on his head.

Thirty years had passed: who can recall all the minutiae of such a long-ago heartbreak?

He sees an opportunity, creates a network of support for it, and makes something transformative happen.

You came up the stairs of the Haghani subway station, and with you the life of the whole nation of Iran came up its throat, leaving its body.

With canine relish and human shame, I’d rather sniff than taste.

Jaime Huenún Villa remembers his Huilliche-Mapuche ancestors and their wise way of being in the territory.

There’s a Tibetan saying that an old man’s country is like an old bird’s nest.

Adriana Paredes Pinda considers the power and implications of writing, what it means to exist between languages, and the lasting effects of colonialism on the Mapuche people.

Daniela Catrileo reaffirms the existence of Mapuche literature—historically considered static or even nonexistent—as a vital, diverse, and growing body of work.

She was golden. As was her writing, which will live on forever.

Liliana Ancalao honors her Mapuche identity and records the violence the state committed against her people in the Conquest of the Desert and Occupation of Araucanía, violence that continues to this day.

Liliana Ancalao and Elisa Taber discuss the genocide of the Mapuche people, and how Mapuche writing both stitches together that open wound and recognizes the historical and cultural continuity of this people.

For translators from under-represented languages like ours, the act of translation can also be a mode of recovery and reclamation.

There was not one single woman present in any of the stadiums I had attended during any of my teams’ matches.

Every night I wake up several times. I have nightmares of executions.

In Poupeh Missaghi's translation, an anonymous author reflects on their relationship to history and on what it means to both witness and participate in historic protests in Iran.

Because I fear for my family whose faces I only know from albums

Saskia Vogel's translation of Linnea Axelsson's Ædnan has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In this essay, Vogel reflects on her years of rereading and translating Ædnan and considers how readers, texts, and…

You might not believe this, but in that little autumn prison courtyard, the dogs and humans are grieving together, wishing for freedom together.

Translation, an obsessive interpretive art in which the boundaries between guest and host are tenderly and strenuously unstable, is my constant companion while I learn what it means to build a life in a country and culture different from the one I was…

Every time I write something in English, I’ve been left feeling guilty, as if I had betrayed someone.

The boy lay down in the middle of the street. All alone.

I thought about the eyes of the girl standing tall with her cut hair. Suddenly, the sun rose.

He needed a phone more than anyone in our prison ward.

Fiction came to us from the West. Creativity did not.

For Sámi literature to continue playing its essential role in our culture and to expand its benefits, we need more writers, readers, and translators, which is impossible without support—both financially and through the education system.

Languages are particularly challenging to exhibit physically in museums—how then to tell the story of our most precious forms of intangible cultural heritage in a tangible form?

The children ask where they are going. They, too, have begun to grasp that they are not heading home.

When we celebrate the increasing visibility of translation, we should also ask about what languages and literatures—and, consequently, what human experiences—are afforded visibility.

In 2014, translating Uyghur knowledge into English felt like a subversive act in itself.