What’s authentic about global literature?
Michele Hutchison investigates what the future might hold for the 21st Century novel: provincial literature with a global reach, or the literature of the cosmopolitan flâneur?
PEN Transmissions
Articles
What is a country?
Following her visit to the UK last week for the London Book Fair Turkey Market Focus, Ece Temelkuran reflects on 'Writing Turkey' and what the term 'country' has come to represent for her.
Stolen Eyes
In advance of his UK tour this week, acclaimed writer and painter Mahi Binebine treats PEN Atlas readers to a short story about young people in Morocco and the 'art' of sleeping.
Translation, Revolution, and Pedagogy
Following her appearance at the Literary Translation Centre for London Book Fair 2013, Samia Mehrez writes about working collaboratively on the book Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, which uses multiple perspectives to translate the linguistic and cultural meanings of the momentous events in her country
New frontiers for translated fiction
Jonathan Ruppin writes for PEN Atlas about the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, what it can tell us about the context of translated fiction in the present and which names to keep an eye out for in the future
The Silk Road
In the run-up to London Book Fair 2013, for which Turkey is the market focus, Murathan Mungan writes for PEN Atlas about how East and West view each other, what Henry James could have learnt from Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil and the building of a new Tower of Babel
What is Official? Turkish writing, from state discourse to civil literature
As part of our ongoing series of PEN Atlas dispatches from Turkey, Kaya Genç describes the struggle for the soul of his country's literature between state officials and independent creative writers
PEN Atlas Q&A – Gerbrand Bakker, author of The Detour
PEN Atlas Editor, Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Gerbrand Bakker about his novel, The Detour, walking in Wales for two weeks, and translating Emily Dickinson
Literature rises in the East
Ayfer Tunç writes for PEN Atlas about the importance of looking beyond the clichés so that Turkish literature is seen in the context of World Literature.
بالدم تُكتب ثقافة سوريا الجديدة
Written in blood: The beginnings of a new Syrian society
In a moving piece for PEN Atlas, Khaled Khalifa writes about the hypocrisy of the intelligentsia, the context of the Syrian revolution, and the task of imagining the world that will come after.
No offence meant
Award-winning translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones experiences extreme reactions to the latest crime novel she has translated on a recent trip to Poland...Here she tells the PEN Atlas of her time in Sandomierz, where she visits the setting of the novel by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.