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"There are moments when I become deeply despaired about whether words have any significance at all. But still, our mission does not change. Literature must foster humans and make the souls of people stronger in order to overcome the loneliness that may swallow up humans when they face atrocious fates."
The Asahi Shimbun

Elif Batuman reckons with the ideology of Anna Karenina, Eugene Onegin, and other beloved Russian books.
The New Yorker

Helon Habila talks with Mason President Gregory Washington about his process of combining compelling narratives and characters with current examples of oppression and exploitation, and how his factual account of the 2014 kidnapping in Nigeria of 276 young girls by the terrorist group Boko Haram forced him to confront his homeland as he had never seen it.

“One Zan” framed an afternoon of readings on H Street in Northeast Washington, DC, during which American women read works alongside Iranian women. I learned about Iranian women writers who have been prodigious in their production of revolutionary works. I learned, for example, that over the last 200 years, Persian poets like Tahereh were executed for exercising their voice and agency.

"Kurdish literature is a very rich literature with a long history. Why is it not widely translated? Why is it not visible? Part of it is the position of the Kurdish language as a minoritized language. However, it’s really important to remember that the minority position has been imposed on Kurds and the Kurdish language—there are 30-40 million Kurdish speakers. It has a much larger number of speakers than some European languages that are not classified as minority languages. The minority position is a political, cultural, and social designation, which has to be challenged."
Asymptote

Jaime Goh, a first-year MFA student in Creative Writing, has been named the recipient of this year’s Robert Raymond Scholarship, encouraging students who contribute to the MFA program’s diversity.

"'I think poetry is in everything that I write because it’s in the language and the attitude of the writing,' said Medel. 'When you write a poem you have to go to the essence of the poem, and I’m trying to do the same in fiction. I try to go to the heart of the story.'"
George Mason University

"I’ve come across highly sophisticated US poetry readers who seem to be intimidated by the Ramayana: they find my book 'culturally challenging' or somehow feel they have to prepare for it, 'educate' themselves before they even start reading. Strangely, no one ever says that about the Iliad or the Odyssey, although those worlds are arguably as distant from ours as the Valmiki is."
Plume Poetry

"Exhausted on the Cross by the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by New York Review Books, has won the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for poetry in translation. The £3,000 prize money will be shared by Darwish and Abu-Zeid."
The Bookseller