There Are Words That Have Never Changed

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, A Man's Place, and The Young Man. 

KRISZTINA TÓTH is one of the most popular and best known Hungarian authors. She studied sculpting and literature in Budapest and spent two years in Paris during her university years. The recipient of numerous awards, she is the author of many children’s books, novels, and poetry collections. In 2015, her novel Aquarium was featured on the shortlist of the German Internationaler Literaturpreis. Her works have been translated into twenty languages, among them Arabic, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.

Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Paris.

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. 

EDMUND GHAREEB is of Lebanese origin and has traveled widely throughout the Middle East. He earned a degree in political science and history from American International College and an MA and PhD from Georgetown University, before teaching as a professor at American University, University of Virginia, and George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He was the editor of Dialog, the graduate journal of the latter university, as well as a frequent interviewer of Arab liberation leaders who visit the United States. He lives in Washington DC.

NASEER H. ARURI (1934–2015) graduated from American International College and received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, where he later taught. His specialty was in the fields of Middle East governments and politics, international studies, and American government and foreign policy. He taught at Southeastern Massachusetts University and traveled extensively as a researcher throughout the Middle East.

JACQUELINE HARPMAN (1929–2012) was born in Etterbeek, Belgium. Her family moved to Casablanca to avoid persecution when the Nazis invaded, and returned home after the war. After studying French literature Harpman began training to be a doctor, but became unable to complete her medical studies after contracting tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954, and her first book was published in 1958. In 1980 Harpman qualified as a psychoanalyst and continued to practice throughout her life. She had given up writing after her fourth book was published in 1966, and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. Harpman wrote over 15 novels including I Who Have Never Known Men, and won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Orlanda.

Over the past forty years, award-winning translator ROS SCHWARTZ has over a hundred works of fiction and nonfiction to her name, from writers such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Andrée Chedid, Aziz Chouaki, Fatou Diome, Dominique Eddé, Georges Simenon and Simone Weil. Her new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Marsh Award. In 2009, she was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. A Fellow of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, she was awarded the 2017 John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence. 

OTTILIE MULZET has translated over seventeen volumes of Hungarian poetry & prose, including works by Szilárd Borbély, László Krasznahorkai, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, Krisztina Tóth, Edina Szvoren, and others. Her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature.
 

In 1973, ABDELLAH TAÏA was born in the public library of Rabat in Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old. Acclaimed as both a novelist and filmmaker, he writes in French and has published eight books now widely translated, including Le jour de roi, which was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. An adaptation of his novel L'Armée du salut was his first feature film, released in 2014, screened at major festivals around the world, and hailed by the New York Times as giving "the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist." Abdellah Taïa made history in 2006 by coming out in his country, where homosexuality is illegal. His commitment to the defense of homosexuals in Muslim countries has made him one of the most prominent Arab writers of his generation—both "a literary transgressor and cultural paragon," according to Interview magazine. Taia has lived in Paris since 1998.

EMMA RAMADAN is an educator and literary translator of all genres from French, with a focus on undersung women novelists, experimental literature, and writers from the Arab world. She is the recipient of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize, the 2018 Albertine Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete by Anne Garréta; A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa; Zabor, or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud; co-translations with Olivia Baes of The Easy Life and Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras; and Panics by Barbara Molinard. Her translations of Lamia Ziadé ’s Mon port de Beyrouth and Ma très grande mélancolie arabe are forthcoming from Pluto Press.

Ratified in 2019, the NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRANSLATION AGREEMENT/NO AMERICA FRAUGHT TRANSLATION ARGUMENT (NAFTA) is made up of three poets from the occupied territories of Canada, Mexico, and the United States: Whitney DeVos, Zane Koss, and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz, respectively. They have translated Hugo García Manríquez’s poetry collection Commonplace (2022), and their other works of translation have appeared in the Denver Quarterly and Folder.