ALTA45 Panel: Bringing a New Audience to Arabic Literature, sponsored by SZBA

In this panel discussion, Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning translators will discuss the process by which they were able to write and publish their books, gain attention from the audience, and how other translators may take advantage of these opportunities to expand Arabic stories and culture to new English-speaking audiences. This discussion will be moderated by one of the publishers of an award-winning book, who will share their own perspective. The discussion will be open to Q&A from the audience and a networking opportunity for translators and publishers to connect.

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Moderator

Erin L. Cox handles the US publicity for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Erin was a publicist at Scribner and HarperCollins, book publishing director at The New Yorker, and Business Development Director at Publishing Perspectives.

Panelists

Michael Cooperson is an American author and translator. Cooperson studied at Harvard University and the American University of Cairo, and is currently a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published two monographs on early Abbasid cultural history: Classical Arabic Biography and Al-Ma’mun. In addition to Impostures, he has translated Abdelfattah Kilito’s L’Auteur et ses doubles (The Author and his Doubles) and Ibn al-Jawzi’s Manaqib al-Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Virtues of the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal). His other interests include Maltese language and culture. Michael Cooperson’s Impostures by al-Hariri (NYU Press, 2020) won a 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the translation category.

Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic. She is a judge for the Palestine Books Awards. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. She was the 2022 translator-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation. Her upcoming translation What Have You Left Behind (Fitzcarraldo Editions) will be released in October 2022. She tweets @sawadhussain.

Chip Rossetti is the Editorial Director at the Library of Arabic Literature. Rosetti has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature (specializing in modern Iraqi fiction) at the University of Pennsylvania, and did his undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin at Harvard. Before his second career in academia, he worked for a number of years as an acquiring editor at US publishers such as Basic Books, Wiley, and Little, Brown. From 2005 to 2007, he was the senior editor at the American University in Cairo Press. His translations include Sonallah Ibrahim’s Beirut, Beirut; Magdy El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro; Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s sci-fi novel Utopia; and Three Poems by Syrian poet Liwaa Yazji (with Samantha Kostmayer Sulaiman.) In 2010, he won a PEN America Translation Fund grant for his translation of Muhammad Makhzangi’s short story collection Animals in our Days.