ABOUT THE BOOK

Documentary producer Rafi Azmi meets a strange woman in Paris - a Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne - who informs him that she has lived a previous life in his village of Sarmada, in southern Syria. It turns out that she is the reincarnation of a woman murdered by her brothers in an honour killing. Affected by her story, Rafi returns to his hometown, to discover an entire world previously hidden from him. The woman’s story leads him to delve into the depths of the place and uncover its secrets, desires, beauty and the co-existence of its people of different religions.

The original Arabic Sarmada was longlisted for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The English translation was published in the UK in 2011 by Swallow Editions and in the US in 2012 by Interlink Books.


SOME REVIEWS ABOUT THE BOOK

– links from https://www.adamtalib.com/translations

And a link to the launch of the Swallow Editions series, of which Sarmada in English translation was their first title. https://publishingperspectives.com/2011/10/rafik-schami-swallow-editions-arab-authors/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fadi Azzam is a Syrian writer, born in Sweida, southern Syria, in 1973. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Damascus in 1998 and has written for Arabic newspapers, as well as publishing a number of stories in Arabic magazines. Between 2007 and 2009, he was culture and arts correspondent for Al Quds al-Arabi newspaper. His novel Sarmada was longlisted for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and his novel Huddud’s House was longlisted for the same prize in its 2018 year.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Adam Talib is a co-editor of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and a scholar of Classical Arabic poetry. He is an award-winning literary translator of Arabic into English – his co-translation with Katharine Halls of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace (published by Overlook Press, US, and Duckworth, UK, in 2016) was joint winner of the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation. The original Arabic edition Tawq al-Hamam was joint winner of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Other translations include Cairo Swan Song by Mekkawi Said, shortlisted for the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, and The Hashish Waiter by Khairy Shalaby, both Hoopoe Fiction/AUC Press).

Shorter translations have appeared in The Common, A Public Space, Spolia, Samia Mehrez (ed.), Literary Atlas of Cairo & Literary Life of Cairo, Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, The Book of Gaza and The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press), and 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo.