THURSDAY 8 FEBRUARY 2024

  The Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 
  Thornhaugh Street, London WC1B 5DQ

       
     We look forward to seeing you. ALL WELCOME
     Just click to register your attendance in-person or online

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     From 6.00pm:
     A welcome drink and bookstall will start the evening in the Brunei Gallery Reception Hall.

     From 6.30pm:
     The online and in-person event begins in the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre with 

   •        KHALED MATTAWA, the renowned poet and poetry translator,
               who will give the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize Annual Lecture 
               on: Stations of Translation: Power, Eros, and Betrayal.

   •       LUKE LEAFGREN, Winner of the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for
              Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Mister N by Lebanese
              novelist Najwa Barakat, who will give readings from the winning work
              and is in conversation with Chair of Judges ROS SCHWARTZ.

   •       Following a Q&A with both the physical and online audience,
              there will be a Reception in the ground floor Reception Hall. 

    The sit-down event will be streamed online and
    available to all who register for access.

    It is a free event.

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   The evening is hosted by

    SOAS Centre for Translation Studies
    SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies
    & the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature

  About the speakers

Khaled Mattawa is the author of six books of his own poetry, and has translated twelve volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry to English. His translations of Adonis: Selected Poems (2010) won the 2011 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and his translation of Saadi Yousse'f selected poems, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (2003). His critical study, Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation was a finalist for the Pegasus Prize.

He was a founding contributing editor of Banipal, Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, and is a co-founder of the Arete Foundation of Arts and Culture, which supports and promotes the creative arts in Libya. Mattawa is the recipient of many Fellowships and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship among many others. He is the William Wilhartz professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan where      he teaches in the Creative Writing program.

Luke Leafgren, the Winner of the 2023 Prize for his translation of Mister N by Lebanese novelist Najwa Barakat, published by And Other Stories. Luke is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College, USA. He has published seven translations of contemporary Arabic novels and received the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Muhsin Al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens. In May 2023, And Other Stories published his translation of Shalash the Iraqi, by Shalash.  The judges said: "In smooth, self-effacing prose, enriched by a widely varied vocabulary, Luke Leafgren leads the reader seamlessly into Najwa Barakat’s creation of a labyrinthine world where all is not as it seems. The shifts in time and point of view are conveyed with aplomb, and the general effect is of a riveting psychological thriller written in delightfully rich and eloquent          English." For the full report click here

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Ros Schwartz, the chair of judges for the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (published in 2010), she has over 100 fiction and nonfiction titles to her name. She has translated a number of Francophone writers including Tahar ben Jelloun, Fatou Diome and Ousmane Sembène, and most recently Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (HopeRoad).

The French government made Ros a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2017 she was awarded the John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. For the past two decades, Ros has been energetically involved in translator training. She gives masterclasses worldwide and is co-founder of a literary translation summer school, first held at Birkbeck in 2011, and later at City University and now at the University of Bristol.