2024: Munir Hachemi from Spain

But I'm going to tell my story - or our story - anyway, and even more rightfully, by hewing to the truth. So don't expect to find any embellishments here beyond the ones imposed by language - which I realize are more than a few. A pessimist would insist that language inflicts so many nuances and misunderstandings - which, by the way, are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence.

- 'Living Things' by Munir Hachemi; translated by Julia Sanchez.

Starting September 2024, our writer-in-residence, Munir Hachemi, will engage with the community through a series of free events, readings, and discussions. Keep an eye on our website for event updates, schedules, and registration details.

EVENTS

DAY OF TRANSLATION and THE DAY AFTER (September 30th, October 1, 2024)

TRANSLATION SLAM (October 8th, 2024)

FALL FOR THE BOOK FESTIVAL (October 16th, 2024)

ABOUT THE WRITER:

Munir was born during a rainstorm one Saturday in Madrid in 1989. He has Algerian ancestry on his father's side. He started selling his stories in fanzines by going around bars in the neighborhood of Lavapies, together with the literary collective Los Escritores Bárbaros. Later on he published his first novel, Los pistoleros del eclipse, and the second, 廢墟, this time published on paper, which he sold not only in Madrid but also in the streets of Granada. In 2018 he published Cosas vivas with Periférica, and in 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the 25 Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. He understands the pleasures of literary translation and has published Los restos, his first poetry book. A number of anthologies contain his stories and poems. He admires courage and intelligence.

ABOUT "LIVING THINGS":

Living Things follows four recent graduates - Munir, G, Ernesto, and Alex - who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling.

Read a review of Living Things in the New York Times: 

Part of this novel’s fun, rough appeal is that Munir and his mates aren’t the genteel, hypersensitive types we’re more used to meeting in contemporary fiction, but plausibly loutish Spaniards who repeatedly trash their campsite, offend the other guests and spend the whole time smoking joints and guzzling beer. But they are not insensible to the low background hum of contemporary horror. By the end, Munir’s working holiday amid the wretched of the earth has left him with an ambivalent view of his own vocation. Storytelling, he concludes, “is something we do on instinct while the world falls to pieces around us.”