Past Events

Published by Comma Press in November 2020, the press release says:

Chess-playing people-traffickers, suicidal photographers, absurdist sound sculptors, cat-loving rebel sympathisers, murderous storytellers... The characters in Hassan Blasim’s debut novel are not the inventions of a wild imagination, but real-life refugees and people whose lives have been devastated by war. Interviewed by Hassan Owl, they become the subjects of an online art project, a blog that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, reportage and the novel.

Framed by an email correspondence with the mysterious Alia, a translator of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the project leads us through the bars, brothels and bathhouses of Hassan’s past and present in a journey of trauma, violence, identity and desire. Taking its conceit from the Islamic tradition that says God has 99 names, the novel trains a kaleidoscopic lens on the multiplicity of experiences behind Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’, and asks how those who have been displaced might find themselves again.

God 99 is entered into the 2021 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

An excerpt from God 99 was featured in LitHub in December 2020: https://lithub.com/god-99/

And Lucy Popescu, who was a judge of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize in 2016, reviewed God 99 in The Guardian, also in December 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/22/god-99-by-hassan-blasim-review-brutal-take-on-refugee-trauma

ALL welcome