Around the globe, February has seen upheavals in Indian publishing, the release of new translations of Central American literature, and the loss of a giant in Palestinian letters. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
The Indian publishing industry was taken by storm on February 1, when Amazon India announced that it was shutting down Westland Books, home to some of the fiercest writing from the country. The details of how it will affect the backlog of books, whether they will remain available or be taken out of circulation, are still unclear. Westland is one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India, with an imprint called Context that publishes literary fiction and another called Eka that publishes translations. They have consistently released daring titles, such as The Price of the Modi Years by Aaker Patel and Modi’s India by Christophe Jaffrelot.
The Mint Lounge, one of the first publications to break the news, wrote: “The editors of Westland were informed about the impending closure only earlier today, a member of the staff at the publishing house said, requesting anonymity.” After hearing the devastating news, many have posted on social media to appeal to readers to buy books before they run out. The Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New Delhi, wrote: “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books that will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature, and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.”
Westland recently published best-selling Malayalam author KR Meera’s latest novel Qabar, translated by Nisha Susan. A short novella of magical realism, the book is a riff on the Babri Masjid case. It explores increased communalism in India and ultimately magnifies the tensions that lead to lynching, mob-making, and dehumanization.
There have been many other notable books and authors published by Westland. These include Imaan by Manoranjan Byapri (translated by Arunava Sinha); Incantations Over Water, Sharanya Manivannan’s first graphic novel; Delhi: A Soliloquy, the JCB Prize-winning novel by M Mukundan (translated by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K); and Poonachi by Perumal Murugan (translated by N Kalyan Raman). The books are available for international shipping here.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
Recently, the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon shared on social media that his latest novel Canción (Libros Asteroide) had won Librería Cálamo’s Premio Cálamo Extraordinario. Based in Zaragoza, Librería Cálamo has previously recognized the work of authors such as Nona Fernández, Guadalupe Nettel, Patricio Pron, and Lina Meruane. Additionally, famed translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn translated Halfon’s Canción into English. It will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in September.
The Poetry Foundation also lately featured the work of Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet Rosa Chávez. The site featured six of Rosa’s poems, translated into English by Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez. You can read more of Rosa’s work in our 2020 fall issue.
Finally, the Premio Luis Cardoza Aragón shortlisted La sombra de voces imposibles, a book by thirty-five-year-old Guatemalan poet, who won the prestigious Premio de Poesía Editorial Praxis in late 2020.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine
Palestinian literature, just like the literature of all other nations, has its big names and brilliant stars. And one could easily find a common denominator among all of them: their teacher.
The “poets doyen” Hanna Abu Hanna—also called “Galilee olive tree,” “al-Karmel’s seer,” and “custodian of Palestinian memory”—whose influence is well acknowledged by each and every one of them—died last week in Haifa at age ninety-three.
Abu Hanna leaves after witnessing all stages of contemporary Palestinian history: from the revolution of 1936, to the year of the Nakba (read his “From a Diary of Fateful Years”), the “setback” (Naksa), all the wars and historical turns that followed, and to the first, second, and later uprisings. In all these periods, he created works of poetry, biography, literary translations, and research until he ended up writing children’s literature.
Sadly, Abu Hanna’s works are not widely known among English readers, although he is included in many scholarly studies. A comprehensive chapter about his life and writing can be read in Khaled Furani’s Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (2012).
He is part of a generation of resistance poets who have engrained their presence in literature and culture since the 1940s. His main motivation for writing was to document the historiography of his home village’s life before 1948—its heritage in social rituals, customs, stories, living, eating, and clothing. In his autobiography Thillu al-Ghayma (The Shade of the Cloud), written at the age of sixty-six, he compares his life in Palestine to a cloud roaming the terrain. Abu Hanna describes life in his home village, al-Raineh, near Nazareth. He writes of the processions held by local peasants to ask for rain, his Quranic schooling in the town of Sdoud, and his time at the boarding school in Jerusalem under British rule. His preoccupation with this period was a response to the Israeli repression machine that sought to erase and deny its existence. He was aware that narrating his personal life would also narrate the history of an entire country. His autobiography is well produced as an Arabic audiobook and can be heard for free on Arabcast.
Once the narrator, now part of the narrative—Hanna Abu Hanna will continue to live in our hearts and be remembered with every passing cloud.
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