Hassan Blasim and Jonathan Wright at Translated By, Bristol
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About the event
Join author Hassan Blasim and translator Jonathan Wright as they discuss their new collection, Sololand with fellow translator Basma Ghalayini.
ABOUT HASSAN BLASIM
Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi-born film director and writer. He settled in Finland in 2004 after years of travelling through Europe as a refugee. His debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was published by Comma in 2009 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His second collection,The Iraqi Christ, won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the first Arabic title and the first short story collection ever to win the award. His third book, God 99: a novel was published by Comma in 2020. (All English editions of his work to date have been translated by Jonathan Wright). His writing has won the Tampere City Literature Prize 2014, the WSOY Literary Foundation Prize 2015, and the Finland Prize 2015. The US edition of his short stories, The Corpse Exhibition was picked as one of Publishers’ Weekly's Books of the Year 2015. Hassan’s fiction has been translated into over 25 languages. He is also a playwright and author of The Digital Hats Game (Telakka Theatre, Tampere, 2016). His documentary films include Blank Mud (1997), Wounded Camera (2000), Sleepless (2006) and Credible (2007). A stage adaptation of his short story ‘The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes’ was brought to the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2014, by director Nick Kent and playwright Rashid Razaq, and starring Nabil Elouahabi.
ABOUT JONATHAN WRIGHT
Jonathan Wright is a translator and former Reuters journalist. His previous translations from the Arabic include Khaled Al Khamissi’s Taxi, Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel (Winner of the IPAF, 2009), Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk (Winner of the IPAF, 2013), Hammour Ziada’s The Longing of the Dervish (Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize), Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (shortlisted for the Man Booker International), Mazen Maarouf ’s Jokes for the Gunmen (shortlisted for the Man Booker International), and Hassan Blasim’s The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ (winner of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize).
ABOUT SOLOLAND
A mysterious black crate arrives at an ISIS command centre in the heart of occupied Mosul, leaving the soldiers and their captives guessing at its contents...
A refugee travels to a remote ‘Northern’ town to study race relations, only to discover one of its bridge-building initiatives is, in fact, a trap...
Drifting from job to job in a corrupt, militia-run Baghdad, a young daydreamer is asked to spy on a protest movement he finds himself entirely sympathising with...
The characters in Hassan Blasim’s latest collection all find themselves in impossible positions – from the ISIS cook working undercover to retrieve ancient manuscripts from a desecrated site, to the refugee in Northern Europe unable to process the devastating dislocation of exile. Violence, intolerance and insecurity stalk them at every turn. And yet, for all their trauma, Hassan’s stories – strung through with intrigue and absurdist humour – are somehow able to draw us in and help us appreciate the infinite complexity implicit in even the most black-and-white contexts.
‘Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’ – The Guardian
‘Brilliant and disturbing... bitter, furious and unforgettable’
– The Wall Street Journal on The Iraqi Christ
'Blasim’s narrators are constantly wrestling with a disintegrating social fabric, confronting that impossible obstacle where individual sense meets societal senselessness… Imagination here is not fantastic escapism or mental sanctuary; it is the scaffolding that holds up the too-vast, too-fractured, and too-chaotic world.' - Asymptote
ABOUT BASMA GHALAYINI
Basma Ghalayini is a translator who grew up in Gaza and moved to the UK at the age of 27. Her translations have been published by Commonwealth Writers, Deep Vellum Press and Comma Press (Banthology, The Book of Cairo, The Book of Ramallah and others). She is the editor of Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba (Comma, 2019), and the forthcoming accompanying piece, Palestine - 1, all set in the year 1948.
