Kader Abdolah is the pseudonym of Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Frahani, an Iranian writer born in Arak, Iran in 1954. Abdolah has lived since 1988 in the Netherlands, and all his latest work has been composed in Dutch. De reis van de lege flesse is the story of an Iranian refugee who moves to the Netherlands and must rebuild his life in a newly adopted nation.
Chinua Achebe. During his childhood in Nigeria, Achebe learned Igbo until he began to study English at age eight. In Things Fall Apart (1994), Achebe exposes the detrimental effects of Western society on traditional Igbo culture. While he writes in English, he subverts Western literary conventions by mixing pidgin with English and echoing stylisytic elements of traditional Igbo storytelling. Achebe heightens the horror of cultural hegemony by using subtle language and imagery to illustrate marginalization and destruction. Achebe's portrayal of cultural decimation is both captivating and enlightening.
Vassilis Alexakis was born in Athens in 1943 and educated in France. He writes in both French and Greek. Other than writing he also makes films. Les mots étrangers [Foreign Words] published in 2002 tells the tale of a boy who cannot convey his father's death in his native Greek or his adopted French. Therefore, he embarks on a journey to Africa to learn Sango and contemplates language loss and his relationship with language in the process. See also our feature description.
Azouz Begag, the son of an Algerian father and a Kabyle (ethnic group in northern Algeria) mother, moved to France in 1949. He was born in 1957 and grew up to be a delegate minister in the government. Begag spoke Arab when he was young, but he also began to study French in school at an early age. His work focuses on the theme of struggling to balance between French and Algerian cultures. On public speaking occasions he has been known to switch between French and English within the span of a sentence. In his books, he writes in French but includs words in Berger occasionally. Le Gone du Chaăba (1986), is autobiographical in nature. The young narrator of Le Gone du Chaaba lives in a poor, predominately Arab community in Lyon, France. Throughout the novel, he grapples with cultural conflicts, struggling to balance his French and Algerian cultural identities. Begag's prose illuminates the tensions of growing up as a minority in French society. This novel has been adapted to film and won the CICAE Award at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival and the Prix Tournage at the 1998 Avignon Film Festival.
Samuel Beckett, modernist
poet, novelist and dramatist, was born in Ireland in 1906 and was one of the
greatest names in the Theatre of the Absurd. Fluent in English, French and
Italian, his most famous works were penned in French. His 1952 play En
Attendant Godot
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born in Ukraine to Polish parents and was fluent in Polish, French and English. His 1899 novella Heart of Darkness is based in the Belgian Congo and is a multi-layered story of the atrocities committed by European colonials in Africa. The novella drew fierce criticism from Chinua Achebe (see above) for its "racist bias."
Junot Diaz (coming soon)
Alexander Hemon moved from Sarajevo to Chicago in 1992, found he could not write in his native Servo-Croatian (Bosnian) and resolved to learn to write in the langauge of his adopted country. His first book in English, The Question of Bruno (2000) is a collection of stories about, among other things, the trauma of war and relocation, the making of a new life for oneself, espionage, beekeeping, assassination, and the art of dodging sniper fire. Very funny and very serious at one and the same time.
Khaled Hosseini. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965, this Afghan-American physician and writer lived with his family in Iran and France before moving to US. His work is heavily influenced by Central Asian poetry and prose. His 2003 novel The Kite Runner was an instant success. It is the story of an affluent Pasthun boy named Amir who is guilty of a betrayal. The story unfolds against the backdrop of key events in the history of the country, such as the fall of the Afghani monarchy, the Soviet invasion, and the Taliban collapse.
Eugene Ionesco
was born on November 26, 1912,
in Slatina, Romania, to a French mother and a Romanian father. His 1985
Journeys
Among the Dead
Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China in 1956. He came to Brandeis University on a scholarship and published his first book of poems after completing his Ph.D. in the United States. He won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel Waiting . Published in 1999, this book is the story of a man pressured into an arranged marriage with a woman he does not love.
Agotha Kristof (coming soon)
Jagath Kumarasinghe. As a journalist and translator, Kumarasinghe has worked mainly in the Sinhala language. After his retirement from copywriting at the age of forty-five, he joined the Beach Waadiya Writers Group of Colombo 6 and began writing short stories in English. His 2004 collection Kider Chetty Street was awarded the prestigious Gratiaen Prize. See a sample of his work at 91st Meridian.06699
Milan Kundera (b. 1921)
is Czech by origin. In order to escape censorship of his work by the Czechoslovak
government, he moved to France in 1975 and has been living in exile ever since.
His book, The
Unbearable Lightness of Being
HIdeo Levy, born in California, writes novels in Japanese. With Seijoki no Kikoenai Heya in 1992, he received Noma Literary Prize.
Yiyun Li, a native of China, started writing in English after she had landed on the U.S., to pursue graduate degree in neurology. The stories in Thousand Year of Good Prayers are the windows of the lives of Chinese readers have little access to. Reading her stories is like watching a movie with beautiful cinematograph that satisfies your craving for exoticism of the ever mistified area of the world. This books gives all what the English readers want; information about communist China, humane stories of those who live under communist regime, written originally in English. Praise of the book aside, this work made me ponder, all over again, why English-language readers shy away from translated literature and/but LOVE works originally written in English only.
Sabit Madaliev is author of fifteen books of poetry published in Russia, the Soviet Union, and his native Uzbekistan. He writes only in Russian, but the subject of his work is Sufi Islam, especially as practiced by the Naqshbandiya of Central Asia. His first book of creative non-fiction, The Silence of the Sufi, was published by Autumn Hill Books in the translation of Russell Scott Valentino in December 2006.
Predrag Matvejevic is the son of a White Russian emigre and a Croat from Mostar. He was a leading Yugoslav public intellectual until his emigration from Croatia in 1991. He taught for a half dozen years at the Sorbonne, then moved to Rome, where he teaches at the University of Rome. He writes in French, Croatian, and Italian, and has regularly taken part in the translation of his many works from Croatian into Italian and French. His masterpiece of Mediterranean lore, Mediteranski brevijar, was translated as Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, by Michael Henry Heim. His 2002 book of lyric essays The Other Venice, was awarded the Strega Europeo prize in 2003.
Yoko Tawada is a poet-novelist who writes in both her native and adapted languages, Japanese and German. She has received several literary awards in Japan and Germany. Her novel, The Bridegroom was a Dog is a twist of a Japanese folktale set in modern Tokyo, portrays a relationship between a cram-school female teacher and a man who is human in appearance but has a dog mentality and behavior.
Vladimir Nabokov is
considered by some the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century in
two languages. As a narrative strategist, Nabokov has alternately fascinated
and maddened several generations of readers. He continued to write in Russian
for years after his emigration following the Bolshevik takeover, but his later
works, most notably Lolita
Selim Nassib is a Lebanese
writer/journalist born in Beirut in 1946 to a Jewish family. He has lived
since 1969 in Paris. He is the author of I
Loved You for Your Voice
Josip Novakovich immigrated
from Croatia to the United States at the age of twenty to attend Vassar College.
At present he teaches at Pennsylvania State University. His collection of
stories, Salvation
and Other Disasters
Fellag Sitartmag is an Algerian performer and novelist living in France. Most of his writing is in French, but he often uses Berber phrases and slang, interspersing. In Le Dernier Chameau, he depicts Algerian-French conflicts in the light of both historical and current events. He reflects on key moments from his childhood in Algeria and describes the discrimination he encountered as a racial minority in France. He often juxtaposes the marginalizaion of Algerians with humorous language. He currently performs Le dernier chameau as a monologue in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris. Like his books, Sitartmag's theatrical performances inspire uproarious laughter while communicating stark societal realities.
Stefan Themerson (1910-1988)
was born in Poland, moved to Russia during the revolution, later emigrating
and finally settling in London. Although he published wrote in Polish, most
of his titles were originally written in English. He made several films with
his wife Franciszka, and is known for his poems, his philosophical essays,
and also his musical compositions. His Hobson's
Island
David Zopetti, is a native Swiss and writes in Japanese. He came to Japan to study Japanese literature as a college student. In 1993, with Ichigensan, his debut novel, he was awarded the Subaru Literay Prize. Ichigensan depicts a foreign student's disappointment and frustration in Kyoto which is rather exclusive for any outsider. The story has a light motif of his relationship with a blind Japanese woman. Other works include Alegrias, Tabinikki - A Travel Diary - Un Journal de Voyage, and Inochi no Kaze.
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(a special thanks to AHB intern Anna Matykowski and University of Iowa graduate student Arpita Kumar for helping to compile this list, and to the following individuals for their suggestions: Christopher Merrill, Susan Harris, Chad Post, Robin Hemley, Dana Strand, Alison Anderson, Natasa Durovicova, Alyson Waters, and David Hamilton. Send us yours)
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