Linguistic threads. IV lines and blood cells. Oppressive silencing. There is a viscerality that emerges when sitting with Rahma Nur’s poem “Fili Linguistici.” In describing her experience as…

What is national literature and how is it defined? Often, when one thinks of a particular nation or language, they imagine a specific phenotype tied to a historical narrative. A cursory Google search…

Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego recalls her childhood experiences in the Italian educational system in this memoir.

Writer Marie Moïse describes her search for her roots and traces her family’s history of cross-Atlantic displacement.I spent my youth seeking to recover my roots, which were severed by migration…

In the wake of 2020’s racist violence, and subsequent organizing by the Black Lives Matter movement and others to combat white supremacy, literary magazines and publishers everywhere have, to differing…

Translator Anton Hur takes a wry look at race and translation in this essay.You’re a white translator. I come into your home office and break your computer. I run a bath and drown all your…

Scholar and translator Corine Tachtiris reflects on the inherent privilege of translating while White in this essay.And if there are few Black translators, there are few representatives of the possibility…

Translator Yilin Wang addresses various forms of bias in translation from Asian Languages in this essay.“You must teach yourself how to carry loan words,tiny seeds gift-wrapped like hand-me-down heirlooms…

This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments.

When I was twenty-three, I met my first girlfriend, who then went off with a man after just four months—and eventually married him.

Mauritanian literature foregrounds characters on the move.

I have come to think of any “definitive text” largely the same way that I think of a mother tongue, at least in my case: an inherently debatable, perpetually relative concept.

A translated work’s pitch is aided by comparisons.

This game of comparisons, while not always accurate, can open doors and be thought-provoking.

Why must two works be compared at all?

It is essential that we understand comps and are aware of their limitations.

The scope of the topics explored in this issue is, therefore, necessarily broad without being comprehensive.

New York City, New York, March 23, 2021—WWB Campus, the online education program of Words Without Borders, announced today the launch of a new unit of literature from Iran.“Read Iran”…

No doubt a few Galicians will think it in very bad taste to inaugurate this issue with a likeness to their higher profile southern neighbors, but because there may be a great many glad for the comparison,…

Geography has been destiny for Georgia and its literature.

Airea D. Matthews to JudgeWinning Poems to Be Published in Poem-a-Day and WWB We’re pleased to announce the 2021 WWB Poems in Translation Contest spotlighting groundbreaking work by poets and…

New York, New York, February 4, 2021—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has just announced that it will distribute more than $25 million in support of 1,073 arts and cultural organizations…

These writings spark immediate conversations through rapid-fire literary texts rather than typical online commentary.

This month, WWB took a look back at some of the important writing on race and racism to be found in the magazine's archives.

There are obstacles translators must face before the international sections of bookstores reflect the world more equitably.

It would be naive to speak of editorial decisions without taking into account power relationships and established patterns of prejudice that undergird the publishing industry.

Running a start-up publisher in Mozambique is challenging, particularly because sales are low due to a nonexistent distribution network and too few bookshops, all located in the capital city.

Much of the radical heart of Nazrul’s larger oeuvre, including his work as a freedom fighter, has been overlooked.

Engaging the evolving dialogue that broadens definitions of global Blackness.

Words Without Borders is pleased to announce the election of Tara Parsons, Associate Publisher of the HarperOne Group, to its Board of Directors. “Tara's expertise and leadership in…

A nation’s upheaval cannot be understood without women's perspectives.

Is there some sort of double marginalization at play?

We’re pleased to welcome Nina Perrotta as WWB’s assistant editor and development associate. Nina is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish and Portuguese. Prior to joining WWB, she…

The protagonist of this month’s work is the natural world in its multitudes.

We're pleased to welcome Varun Nayar as a WWB editorial fellow. Varun is a writer, editor, and researcher from Delhi, India. He was most recently the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, and…

Global warming manifests in obvious ways.

Chaos is not confined to the glacier’s edge.

No single means of communication can be solely effective, because climate change is such a “wicked” problem—it is truly planetary in scale.

When do the provocative girlie girls turn into discreet wives who put on conservative dresses?

It was an Hunahpúan effort to choose only four poems from this extraordinarily strong pool of poems.

Some of them have often called upon their Chinese or Japanese roots; others have alighted upon the topic only a few times, if at all.

In his spare time, he wears clothes.

In the midst of a pandemic defined by isolation, our second Poems in Translation Contest brought together 935 poems from 448 poets and 87 countries, translated from 58 languages. We are thrilled to announce,…

The colonial system is still alive in Peru.

A real work of Amerindian literature makes perceptible another way of ordering and being in the world.

With the news coming out of Iran, I was already beginning to feel the weight of the ongoing disaster in my body.

When I go out with my daughter, I herd her along, trying to keep her two meters away from anyone who approaches.

The characters in the works presented here demand recognition of the full spectrum of Queer experience in often hostile environments.

She can't count how many times she had silicone applied to her body.

We are bad actors who suddenly find themselves in a leading role.

What has the coronavirus taken from us? We need to answer this in a way that isn’t expressed through numbers.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.

Women were confined to reading prayer books and religious hymns. And they wrote in the margins. Centuries went by. Those marginalia are, in fact, the books I need to read.

Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”

It was not my plan to start writing a diary, let alone keep doing it for seventy-seven days.

“The world will remain untouchable and unknowable, whether you’re in its corona or not.”

Right from the start, Cabo Verdean concepts of identity and individuality were defined by this mixed reality: the African and the European, in all their diverse and contrasting characteristics.

It was only very gradually that we came to understand that the Europeans, out of malice or simple ignorance, had instilled in us our reluctance to accept our condition as Africans.

In those days the island of Boa Vista was the whole world.