Posted
May 4th, 2011
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Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, edited by Samuel Shimon
Translated from the Arabic, French & Dutch by various authors.
Beirut39 presents 39 of the best young Arab writers from around the world. Ranging from Saudi Arabia to Morocco, from France to Syria and from Lebanon to Holland and the USA, and taking in poetry, short stories and extracts from novels, the collection showcases the vibrancy and diversity of writing across the Arab world which has not been widely represented in the West until now. The publication is part of Beirut 39, a Hay Festival project to celebrate Arab writers under the age of 40. The judges who selected the writers from almost five hundred candidates were Egyptian literary critic, Gaber Asfour; Lebanese poet and cultural editor of the international daily Al-Hayat newspaper, Abdo Wazen; Lebanese writer, Alawiya Sobh; and Omani poet and editor-in-chief of the Omani cultural magazine Nazwa, Saif al-Rahbi.
Published by Bloomsbury, April 2010
Samuel Shimon was born into an Assyrian family in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, in 1956. He left his country in 1979, with the dream of becoming a Hollywood director, and has since lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Aden, Cairo, Tunis and Paris. In Paris, he settled for the next decade as a refugee, and started the small press Gilgamesh Editions. In 1996, Shimon moved to London where he lives today. He is the co-founder and assistant editor of Banipal magazine, and creator of kikah.com, an online journal of Arab culture. His first novel, the autobiographical An Iraqi in Paris, was published in 2005, long-listed for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and nominated for the long list of the 2006 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage.
Haroon Shirwani is one of the translators of Beirut39. He is Head of Arabic at Eton College, having studied Arabic, French and History at Oxford and London universities. Previously, he tutored in Oriental Studies at Oxford and worked as a lecturer in translation at Buckingham University. Each year he produces A Taste of Texts – a selection from Arabic literature, with his translations, for use by students and teachers.
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/recentlysupportedtitles/beirut39/
