Today I am handing over guest editor duties to Turkish author Kaya Genc. Thank you Kaya for this thoughtful piece! Exile wasn’t a choice for Turkish dissidents of the twentieth century. It was a necessity. Turkish literature’s luminaries, from the poet Nâzım Hikmet to the novelist Halide Edip Adıvar, lived abroad because autocrats who ruled … Continue reading Literature of Exile: Şavkar Altınel
“The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling" Perhaps the only thing more painful than leaving a beloved country behind is to realize that one's former country no longer exists. Emigres from the former Yugoslavia find themselves in this perplexing, and bewildering predicament: are they now merely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian? If, … Continue reading Literature of Exile: Dubravka Ugrešić
"…where we come from the greatest achievement is to leave.” Arguably one of the richest traditions in exile literature is that of Cuban Americans. Given the strong economic and cultural ties between the two countries before Castro's revolution in 1959, it was hardly surprising that so many Cubans who fled the Communist takeover made the … Continue reading Literature of Exile: Cuba in the fiction of Cristina Garcia, Ana Menendez, and Achy Obejas
To read global literature is to accept the compromise of translation. Even the most polyglot among us cannot hope to read everything that interests us in its original language. English has become the somewhat grudgingly accepted lingu franca for most of the world, yet to read and write in English is to speak the colonizer's … Continue reading Literature of Exile: Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Hello again! Many of the authors we will read about this month were exiled in isolation, for their individual acts of dissent or rebellion. Yet there are stories of entire communities exiled and driven from their homelands. One such expulsion that has captured world attention in recent years is that of the Rohingya. Although they … Continue reading Literature of Exile: The Rohingya #ExileLit
My name is Lesley Williams, and I am guest editing the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative blog for November. What a tremendous honor! As a librarian, I enjoy combining my love of beautiful writing with advancing social justice. So what better theme to choose that the literature of exile? Ovid, Dante, Victor Hugo, Wole Soynika, … Continue reading #ExileLit Welcome to the Literature of Exile
My month in the editor’s chair of the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative blog has come to an end. I’d like to thank sincerely all the publishers and contributors over the past month for providing such interesting and inspiring blog posts. At a time when everyone is so stretched and busy, your support and cooperation … Continue reading #TranslatedLit Editor’s Reflections by Rónán Hession
At Tilted Axis Press we publish contemporary literature translated from Asian languages into a variety of Englishes. We started in 2015 and have released 20 books (and four chapbooks) since then, by authors from Japan to Uzbekistan, Nepal to Thailand. We’re not really confined to a genre or type and have published novels, short stories, … Continue reading #TranslatedLit An Introduction to Tilted Axis Press
Here at And Other Stories we believe that great literature is great literature, wherever it comes from. Since starting out in 2011, we’ve built a varied list of great literature in translation and originally in English, both fiction and non-fiction (and even a little poetry). We started out at a time, after the financial crash, … Continue reading #TranslatedLit Introduction to And Other Stories by Nicky Smalley
We close this tumultuous year with three titles – No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, Women Dreaming and Strange Beasts of China – translated from Kannada, Tamil, and Chinese, respectively. First up, and finishing up our 2020 trifecta of short stories – and following on from Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko (translated from … Continue reading #TranslatedLit Three titles for the autumn by Tilted Axis Press
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 