English PEN World Atlas

The National has a profile marking the author's tour marking the English publication of Sunset Oasis, his Arabic Booker-winning novel.

Meanwhile, the Complete Review salutes another leading Arabic writer, Zakaria Tamer, with two reviews.

It may be a London freesheet but Metro has a high-powered book club going on. Mourid Barghouti's memoir I Saw Ramallah (translated by Ahdaf Soueif) follows The Line of Beauty (August) and The White People (July) in what could potentially be the largest virtual book club out there. So if you're commuting in London, look out for Tube neighbours reading a book with this cover:
and say hi to book club members in person, or leave reviews and comments on the site for other readers to share.

PEN Atlas is featured on Booktrust's Translated Fiction site, a lively and exciting resource whether you're a reader or translator, with reviews, articles (including an inside look at the BCLT Translation Summer School), a blog, and news of UK prizes and initiatives for fiction in translation.

The View from Fez has the scoop as a Moroccan writer, Bensalem Himmich, professor of philosophy at the Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is the auhtor of over 26 books in both Arabic and French.

He has previously won the critics' prize (1990) for his novel "Le fou du pouvoir," a book elected by the Arab Union of Writers as one of the hundred best books of the 20th century. He also won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his book Al-'Allamah (2001), "The Polymath," a book about the great Arab writer Ibn Khaldoun.

I can't find the title of the winning book anywhere, including the page at American University of Cairo, who publish the English translations of the winning books -- they're still on 2007.

Thanks to Words Without Borders for flagging up this new book from Dalkey Archive Press. Based on a British Council symposium, translator Gill Paul gathered contributions from leading translators, including PEN members Ros Schwartz and Amanda Hopkinson, to present the most coherent and comprehensive guide to the pragmatics of translation.

Courtesy of the Center for the Art of Translation: five poems recorded at the Center's Lit & Lunch series.

Iraqi poet Soheil Najm and Saudi Arabian short-story writer Hanaa Hijazi will be taking part in a reading at 5 p.m. Sept. 4 in the Shambaugh House, the IWP headquarters at 30 N. Clinton St. on the University of Iowa campus. They're two of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program 2009 participants, alongside novelist, poet, scriptwriter, and translator Yasser Abdellatif from Egypt; French (of Algerian heritage) novelist and essayist Mabrouck Rachedi; and Jordanian filmmaker Yahya Alabdallah.