Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme

Mentors

• 

  Sawad Hussain

  Sawad Hussain mentored Addie Leak as part of our Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme.

  Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur who is passionate about bringing narratives from the African continent to wider audiences. She was co-editor of the Arabic-English portion of the award-winning Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). Her translations have been recognised by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society and the Palestine Book Awards, among others. She has run workshops introducing translation to students and adults under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes and Shubbak Festival. She has forthcoming translations from Fitzcarraldo Editions, MacLehose Press, and Restless Books. She holds an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS. Her Twitter handle is @sawadhussain.

• 

  Golan Haji

  Golan Haji mentored Zein Sa’dedin as part of our Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme.

  Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in France. He has published four books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016). His translations include (among others) books by Mark Strand, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War, 2016, a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women. 

• 

  Nermin Nizar

  Nermin Nizar mentored Mariam Naji as part of our Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme.

  Nermin Nizar is a writer, translator and cook. She is a member of a collaborative translation lab and a freelance translator who is currently working on creating an oral history archive of music created in Alexandria for the local audience. Her work in translation has included four novels, After a Funeral by Diana Athill, The Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accent by Julia Alvarez. A fifth novel is to come out shortly in 2021. She has also translated and collaborated on the translation of several works of non-fiction, including works by Angela Davis and Serge Daney. She has also published fiction and is the chef and curator of a series of pop-up restaurants.

• 

  Katharine Halls

  Katharine Halls mentored Ali Al-Jamri as part of our Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme.

  Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El-Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s novel The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival.