Juan Gabriel Vásquez gave the inaugural Lancaster International Fiction Lecture on Tuesday, October 12, at 7:30 PM BST as part of Litfest's “Autumn Weekend” (October 7–12).  The year Pablo Escobar was killed was the year I realized I would become a writer. Escobar was, of course, the head of the drug cartel whose war against the Colombian state had shaped my teenage years, beginning with the murder of a minister of justice in 1984—I...

The languages featured in this issue take us back more than five hundred years, when the monsoon winds brought traders from the Arabian Peninsula, China, and India to the Malay Archipelago. Language contact between different Asian communities who sailed across the seas to trade, and the arrival of first the Portuguese and Spanish, and later the Dutch and British, in Asia resulted in the development of hybrid communities, out of which arose new contact languages, often referred to as...

This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the third edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 606 poems from 327 poets and 79 countries, translated from 61 languages. This year’s winners were selected by Pew Fellow and Yale Series of Younger Poets winner Airea D. Matthews. The winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and in POETS.org’s Poem-a-Day on Saturday, September 25, and Saturday, October 2. Published...

PEN International, with 155 centers in more than 100 countries, celebrates its centennial this year with writers around the world who share a commitment to freedom of expression, to literature and the written word, and to each other. Its younger cousin Words Without Borders, launched in 2003, has translated into English and published over 2700 writers from 140 countries, translated from 126 languages. Both organizations were founded in the wake of cataclysmic global events. PEN...

Wild, worldly, polyglot. Three words that capture the spirit of Malaysia’s cultural landscape. Malaysia is a country where at least four languages predominate—Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil—alongside a plethora of regional dialects, indigenous languages, and creole languages.  This cultural and linguistic plurality has been the historical reality of Malaysia long before it became a nation. The complex diversity of the Malay Peninsula has been evident since at...

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 a member of a diaspora living in Italy—the loss of language, the persistent reminder of being other and outsider—Nur juggles the passive and active contestations of how language marks the body and how it shapes one’s experience with loss. Despite being a poem...

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 of contemporary Italian women writers spits out lists of writers one should read, including Elena Ferrante, Giulia Caminito, Viola di Grado, and Donatella Di Pietrantonio, to name a few. These women, whose works have transcended linguistic and cultural borders through translation, are also who...

Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego recalls her childhood experiences in the Italian educational system in this memoir. Although I’m Somali-Italian, I was born and raised in Italy, and I’ve spent very little time in Somalia, mostly during the summers and then once for about a year and a half. I went to the Italian consulate’s school there. I had no idea what Somalia would be like at first. It might as well have been Mars or any other unfamiliar planet populated with...

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 from one shore of the Atlantic to the other—from Haiti to Italy. I investigated, interrogated, and sought to understand. From the time of my birth, I have suffered a strange nostalgia for the pain of a journey I have never taken. It seems like my family’s psyches were...

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 degrees, made efforts to publish more writers of color. Within the translation community, a corresponding issue arises: Who is chosen to translate, and what assumptions and structures support and drive those decisions? What roles do race and privilege play? And how can we assure...

Welcome to our twelfth annual Queer issue. This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments. Some find themselves at turning points, while others reckon with past choices or cope with the fallout of decisions made by those around them. In their divergent settings and circumstances, these characters confront their individual crises with ingenuity and alacrity, pivoting within their shifting contexts. In South African writer Olivia...

Grandma’s Girlfriends is a response to The Rainbow Bus: Youthful Reminiscences of Twelve Older Gay Men/彩虹熟年巴士: 12位老年同志的青春記憶 (GBooks, 2010). Tong, the cameraperson at the launch of The Rainbow Bus, remembers feeling indignant that only queer men were included in this book, and set in motion a plan to record the lives of older queer women too. Over the next few years, a...

The release of the Hollywood film The Mauritanian earlier this year made a harrowing tale of torture and injustice at Guantánamo Bay the first Mauritanian story to truly reach the world. When the book the film was based on—Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi—came out in 2015, there were only three books written by Mauritanian authors available in English.[1] The number of Mauritanian works which had been translated into other languages or won regional literary...

Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, to greater or lesser degrees of success. I was not apprehensive when translators began turning the novel into other languages—into Spanish or German or Dutch, for example. Rather, the prospect gratified me. But when it came to replicating this particular book, conceived and written in Italian, into the language that I...

"Brazil's Virginia Woolf." "Sebaldian." An heir to Flaubert, Stendhal, Sterne . . . Comps—or comparative titles/authors—are ubiquitous in publishing, particularly when it comes to international literature. They are intended as a guide for publishers, readers, booksellers, critics, publicity teams: situating new works and writers in the context of the well-known, it is thought, can help these new works succeed. It is common among all of the aforementioned groups at...

GOTO WARD SENT ROPY thef utur ecan goto hell andm eltt here huma nkin dcan goto thef utur ethe nrot   infa rawa yice land thet ribe obse rves asag laci erde cays thes amea sape rson   sinc eice land only bear ssan dand rock itca nnot care less ifli feis thri ving   when iwas five isaw atow erin ggla cier that late rdro wned amon gthe drif tice   Kári Tulinius trans. Larissa Kyzer   It was about four years ago, during the last summer I...

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, I can hardly imagine a better point of entry to the little-known trove that is Galician literature. Indeed, ever since the independence of Portugal in 1143 from the Spanish Kingdom of León, and the subsequent split of their common vulgar tongue, debate has raged over just where (and...

In her quarterly column, Maya Jaggi, our Critic at Large, provides a brief history of Georgian letters, whose influences look east and west. Jaggi has curated Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern: Where Europe Meets Asia, an online festival of Georgian writers inspired by the café culture of Georgia’s first democratic republic of 1918–21, taking place online from February 25 to 28.  In a little park with soaring fir trees behind the old parliament...

Young, formally inventive, and digital by nature—these are only some of the characteristics of Russophone literature today. Here, we present Russophone writers born in 1985 or later who work in shorter genres, from minimalistic flash fiction and protest poetry to visual performance. This issue is not a collection of “Russian literature” because many of its contributors are not ethnically Russian, and many are not Russian nationals. What they have in common is their use of...

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. 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 degrees, made efforts to publish more Black writers. But as some Black writers and editors have pointed out, it is equally as important that we evaluate...