The items below were posted to the original IWP website as "happenings" in 2021.
In Jeune Afrique, Umar TIMOL discusses biases inherent in recent literary prizes awarded to African writers.
Among the twelve distinguished inaugural honorees of the International Writers programme, established in 2021 by the Royal Society of Literature to “recognise the contribution of writers across the globe to literature in English,” is Dubravka UGREŠIĆ.
An enthusiastic review in NYTimes of In Case of Emergency, newly translated, by the Iranian novelist Mahsa MOHEBALI.
Meena KANDASAMY speaks about reading & translating the writings of Tamil Eelam’s women fighters, and about braiding feminism and decolonialization across genres, media, and continents (including Iowa).
To mark PEN International’s centennial, Words Without Borders has published a sampler of works by writers committed to freedom of expression. Algerian novelist and scholar Med MAGANI is among them.
A fall harvest of book reviews coming in: of The Others by Sarah BLAU (translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir); of LO Yi-Chin’s Farewell, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy TIANG; of Véronique TADJO’s In the Company of Men…
A fascinating interview with IWP’s Senior Advisor, professor Peter Nazareth, retired from UI’s English Department in spring 2021, after nearly five decades of teaching.
Word reaches us that poet HU Xudong , who also taught comparative and world literatures at Peking University (Beida), specializing in Latin American literatures, passed away unexpectedly. RIP, Hu Xudong…
We note with sadness the passing of Hiroshi SAKAGAMI 坂上 弘, whose long novelistic career garnered him major literary and cultural honors. A former president of the Japan Writers’ Association, he was until his retirement also the director of Keio University Press.
The poetic documentary Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores, written and co-produced by Takako ARAI and creatively subtitled into English by a class of UI students of Japanese, will be screened at the prestigious Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, on-line 10/7-14/2021.
Excerpts from Enza GARCÍA ARREAZA’s second poetry collection Cosmonauta have appeared in a Russian translation by Dmitri KUZMIN.
Cocoon by ZHANG YUERAN, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy TIANG, is among the winning titles of English PEN's translation awards for 2021.
The Simon Billenness Emergency Challenge Fund for a New Myanmar/International Campaign for the Rohingya and artist Chaw Ei Thein are launching a virtual memorial garden to honor those killed in the wake of the 2/1 military coup. Artists in any media, Burmese and international, are invited to contribute.
Among the judges for the 2022 Booker International Prize is novelist and translator Jeremy TIANG.
Sukrita Paul KUMAR interviews Christopher MERRILL for Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English.
We mourn the premature death of our friend, collaborator, and colleague, the Russian playwright, dramaturge, and author Ksenia DRAGUNSKAYA. May she rest in peace.
Among the 12 winners of NYTimes' fourth annual Student Podcast Contest is a team featuring Caroline GAO (Between the Lines youth program, 2020), with the podcast “Asian Fetishization, Past and Present.”
An intriguingly open-ended review of Wen Cheng [The Lost City] (Beijing, 2021), the most recent novel by YU HUA , can be found in the just-out issue of World Literature Today.
On June 14th, Asia Society will host an evening of readings in support of the Burmese writers killed or arrested following the military coup earlier this year. Among the presenters will be US Poet Laureates Joy Harjo and Robert Hass, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), poets Brenda Hillman, David St. John, and Christopher MERRILL (USA), Esther DISCHEREIT (Germany), Kinga TÓTH (Hungary), and many more. Register here.
Today’s “Poem-a-Day,” by TSE Hao Guang 谢皓光, is from his volume The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association, forthcoming from Tinfish Press.
We regret to note the passing, after a life of exile, of the distinguished Iraqi poet and translator Saadi YUSEF (Youssef). His translation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself into the Arabic became one of the cornerstones of WhitmanWeb.
Do yourselves a favor and go watch The Middleman, a French-Belgian miniseries co-written and co-directed by Etgar KERET and Shira Geffen, on The Criterion Channel as of June 2021.
New books by alumnae Enza Garcia ARREAZA (Cosmonauta) and Pilar QUINTANA (Los Abismos) are reviewed in the May 2021 (18) issue of Latin American Literature Today.
It is with deep regret that we note the death, of COVID, of the distinguished Delhi-based poet, journalist, editor and activist Mangalesh DABRAL (IWP ’91). Among his vast body of work is also a travel diary from his time in Iowa City, Eek bar Ayova.
الأول , the tenth novel by Sahar KHALIFEH (IWP’78), published in Beirut in 2010, has just appeared in English translation from Hoopoe Press in Cairo as My First And Only Love. Read a review at WLT.
The Octopus Has Three Hearts is the fiction debut of the imaginative poet and teacher, Vancouver-based Rachel ROSE.
Among the 2021-2 Cullman Fellows at the New York Public Library are Josephine ROWE, Madeleine THIEN and Lewis HYDE.
The story “Red_Bati” has landed Dilman DILA a spot on the British Science Fiction Association 2021 awards shortlist.
Hind SHOUFANI, the co-writer and editor of the Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated short The Present, in which a Palestinian father and daughter try to cross Israeli checkpoints, speaks about the project here. On Netflix through April 2021.
Opening the new International Writers Series at Washington University in St Louis (moderator Matthias GOERITZ) is the German-Jewish poet and multimedia artist Esther DISCHEREIT. Register here for her reading on 4/14/21, 1-2pm CDT.
Damascus, Atlantis, a poetry collection by Marie SILKEBERG, translated from the Swedish by former IWP stalwart, poet Kelsi VANADA, will be appearing from Terra Nova/MIT in April 2021.
On the 2021 International Booker longlist, Can Xue's 残雪 novel I Live in the Slums , in Karen Gernant’s and Chen Zeping’s translation from the Chinese.
“Awarded every three years to a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of their work,” the 2021 PEN Career Achievement Award goes to the intrepid Pierre JORIS.
One of the four 2020 Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Big Other magazine, recognizing “innovative writers who shape the conversation about literary art, about language, form, structure, style,” goes to the distinguished Chinese novelist Can Xue 残雪.
Excerpts from the forthcoming volume of poems Exhausted on the Cross by Najwan DARWISH, in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation from the Arabic and superbly introduced, can be read at The Paris Review blog.
Read and watch a lovely remembrance of Marvin BELL, Iowa’s first Poet Laureate, devoted friend of IWP, a mensch.
For her novel Liebe um Liebe, Dragica RAJČIĆ is among this year's recipients of the significant Schweitzer Literaturpreis.
The PEN America Literary Grants for 2021 have been awarded: among them, to Natascha Bruce for Owlish and the Music-Box Ballerina, her translation, from the Chinese, of a novel by Dorothy TSE. A honorary shout-out also to IWP friend Ekaterina PETROVA, the recipient of a grant for her translation, from the Bulgarian, of a novel by Jana Boukova.
Fiction writer and journalist THAWDA Aye Lei forwards a call for solidarity and protest by 125 independent Myanma writers against the military’s overthrow on 2/1/21, of a democratically elected government and the subsequent massive detentions. A call for release of those detained and for a reinstatement of Myanmar's democratically elected government has also been issued by PEN International.
In the wake of a finalist position in 2020 in the US National Book Award competition, Pilar QUINTANA’s winning streak continues, with her novel Los abismos receiving the distinguished El Alfaguara prize for 2021.
IWP mourns the untimely passing of our friend and alumna CHOI Jeongrye 최정례 (South Korea, ’06), a poet of remarkable imagination and sensitivity, celebrated at home and in translation.
Congratulations on fall 2020 awards and nominations: Pola OLOIXARAC, one of the two winners of the prestigious 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award for her forthcoming Atlas Literario del Amazonas; Courtney SINA MEREDITH, co-short-listed on the NZSA Heritage Literary Awards list, and Wipas SRITHONG, one among the six finalists for the ASEAN-centric Epigram Books Fiction Prize.