Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival

February 25, 2026 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week I returned to Dibrugarh in Assam, India, for the third year running to take part in the Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival (DUILF). It’s a long journey for me to get to this part of the world – this time complicated by a cancelled flight – but it’s always worth it and it has been my great privilege to be a part of this extraordinary event designed to bring literature to young people in this traditionally marginalised region since its inception.

This year, it was bigger and better than ever, featuring more than 140 writers from more than 25 countries. We were kept busy from morning to night, hurrying between stages and auditoriums, conversations with journalists and dignitaries, dinners and performances, all the while being royally entertained.

As I said in my speech at the closing ceremony (you can see me on the stage above, in between celebrated Indian writer Murzban Fali Shroff and trailblazing Egyptian publisher Sherif Bakr), there are many things that are special about what Dibrugarh University and the Foundation for Culture Arts and Literature do at this festival, but this year I was particularly struck by three things:

The warmth of the welcome At many festivals writers are brought in and out fairly smartly, with only a short time to interact and share ideas. In Dibrugarh, they are embraced. Because of the remoteness of the setting, all the international writers come for the whole four days, which allows for many conversations and develops a strong bond between participants, nurturing friendships old and new. I was particularly delighted to spend time with South African writer Shubnum Khan and Galician translator, interpreter and writer María Reimóndez, both of whom returned to the festival. It was also a great pleasure to meet Syrian writer Shahla Ujayli and Galician author Susana Sanches Arins, both of whose work I have featured on this blog.

What’s more, the enthusiasm of the audience members is incredibly moving. After the session I had with the German writer David Clémenceau, I found myself surrounded by students, many of whom had also come to my talks and workshops in previous years. One had even come from an exam with her mother to hear me. They told me how much the conversations and my work had meant to them, with several being kind enough to say they had found them lifechanging. For a writer, there are few experiences more precious than this.

The robustness of the discussion As a festival programmed by global south curators (led by the indefatigable Rahul Jain), DUILF looks through a different lens to many of the events I’m used to attending in the UK. I was reminded of this by the keynote speech at the opening ceremony from Talmiz Ahmad, former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He talked in strong terms about how recent global events may impact India: ‘Those of us with nations affiliated with the global south rejoice among ourselves that western hegemony is at an end. It has been with us for several centuries. It brought some good but mostly it harmed us… But we live in an age of unpredictability.’

Over the four days that followed, there were a number of fairly explosive, though always respectful, exchanges on everything from AI to military strategy. As the festival had made the Middle East and North Africa (or the Arab World) its focus, it was inevitable that many of the events shaping geopolitics received airtime. I was privileged to chair two sessions with the Arab writers, and found the discussion we had on identity and belonging especially moving. In particular, I was struck by Bahraini writer Leila Al Mutawa’s comments on the role of the sea in her identity. I look forward to reading her work when it becomes available in English.

The festival’s place in nurturing culture In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival. Those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Many are necessarily a blend of the two. DUILF is a rare example of a festival that is entirely about nurturing culture and connection. It is free to all comers and lays the foundations for many projects and collaborations that will doubtless go on to bear fruit. Indeed, it has already influenced my work: I describe an exchange in a workshop I ran there in 2024 in Relearning to Read. This year, the festival even produced its own anthology, and I was delighted to contribute a short story, and see my work published alongside pieces by writers including Shubnum Khan, Siphiwo Mahala and my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie.

It was a truly joyful experience. I think the video below captures this. It was taken during my visit to Radio Gyanmalinee, the university’s community radio station. You can see the happiness on my face.

Thank you Dibrugarh – you are a shining beacon in the literary landscape! Already looking forward to next year…

Book of the month: Raharimanana

January 28, 2026 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

In the midst of some pretty gloomy headlines over the last month or so, online African literature magazine Brittle Paper brought heartening news. Its 100 Notable African Books of 2025 shows up some encouraging trends: around a third of the titles on the list are translated from a broad spread of languages, including Shona, Malagasy and Arabic. What’s more, in addition to works by globally renowned names such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abdulrazak Gurnah (my 2012 pick for Tanzania, years before he won the Nobel Prize), debuts make up around a third of the entries.

Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that 62% of the books are published by independent publishers or presses based in Africa. It seems that the major British and American publishers, commonly known as the Big Five, are no longer calling the shots when it comes to determining what African stories appear in the world’s most read language.

My latest Book of the month is one of the titles on the list. An Advance Reading Copy was sent to me by its translator, Allison M. Charette. Some years ago she brought the first novel from Madagascar into English after learning through this project that there was no full-length fiction from that nation of some 30 million people available in English translation. Now she’s back with another: Return by the Malagasy author, essayist, poet and playwright Raharimanana, a novel which follows another writer, Hira, on a surreal book tour as he and his story roam ‘the wide world over’, trying to reconcile his happy childhood memories with the reality of his father’s political persecution.

Before I go on, I should offer a health warning: writing about a book like this presents many challenges for the citizen of a former colonial power like me. So much of the vocabulary that has become standard in literary criticism assumes the primacy of the European novel form. Even seemingly innocent formulations can carry the implication that works by writers such as Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy and co are the gold standards against which everything else should be judged. I have made an effort to weed this out of my writing, but it’s possible that elements of it linger. Read with care.

In fact, reading with care and questioning the assumptions built into dominant narratives is one of the central threads of Return. Among the many instances of this are Hira’s memories of his younger self discovering the problems with the perspective of many of the Western films aired in his father’s makeshift cinema:

‘Hira did have a sense at the time, a vague sense of what was playing out, of how the white man was always the embodiment of order, justice and good. Yul [Brynner] belonged to the civilizations that had to be conquered absolutely: magnificent but savage, magnificent but bloodthirsty, magnificent but merciless, magnificent but conquered, ultimately conquered, Yul Brynner humiliated by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, burned at the stake in Taras Bulba, strict to the absurd in The King and I, Deborah Kerr meant to provide a good and proper education for his son, and for the great king Yul, to boot! It infuriated Hira, why should they have to follow white people’s laws and customs? He would have slapped that Deborah Kerr governess across the face!

‘One time, before they left for the rec room, he asked his father: Why does Yul Brynner always lose, aren’t there any movies where he wins? “The Magnificent Seven”, his father said, he wins in “The Magnificent Seven”. No, I mean where he’s the main character! His father got that small smile on his face that irritated him so much…’

Raharimanana’s narrative works on different terms, making Hira and the events of his home community and continent the focus, and pushing European concerns and structures to the margins. While the German holocaust is mentioned in passing, the horrific events that devastated Rwanda in 1994 – ‘a genocide rocked by a lullaby’ – receive painstaking attention, shaking Hira and the reader to the core.

I repeatedly find myself wanting to call this approach a recalibration of or a response to European narratives, but this feels reductive. It is as though the colonialist in me still needs to see Europe at the centre of this novel, and if it can’t be the hero then it must be the villain, the main negative force against which the story fights. In fact, for much of the book, Europe and its concerns are also-rans – small and rather far away.

The treatment of time is intriguing. Present and past are woven together. Memories are plaited into contemporary events. Like Hira on his book tour, we often don’t know where or when we are. ‘The feelings we keep from the past produce more than our lived reality,’ we read at one point. Often this seems to be the state in which Hira operates.

There is also a deeply sensuous quality to the writing, with the impact of ideas and events often presented primarily through the body rather than discussed and analysed. This heightens much of the novel’s beauty – we feel the splendour of the landscape, for example, and our senses thrill to the wonder of the comingled heritages present in the Malagasy population. But it also intensifies the moments of horror and violence, taking us into suffering in a direct and visceral way.

This is powerfully deliberate: writing, Raharimanana proposes, is the way that Hira and perhaps all of us can find a way to move through and past horrors. Fiction is our best hope of confronting the incomprehensible.

And there is much in this book that will be incomprehensible to anglophone readers. The repeated references to Hira failing to understand things, finding himself conversing with people who don’t speak his language, and grappling with concepts that elude him make it clear that this is a fundamental part of the reading experience and probably something many readers of the original version go through too. However, with the language shift and perhaps added cultural distance that comes with it, more of the passages of this book may play out beyond the English-language reader’s grasp.

At such moments, like Hira, we can only give ourselves over to momentum, letting the whirling tiomena of the narrative sweep us along. An uneasy experience, perhaps. But well worth it when the visibility clears and we can look back and appreciate how far we’ve come.

Return by Raharimanana, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Seagull Books, 2025)

Picture: ‘Madagascar’ by Eugene Kaspersky on flickr.com

Book of the month: Yun Ko-eun

December 23, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

‘What have you got in that you’re excited about?’ I asked Hunter at the Folkestone Bookshop when I popped in a while back.

As often happens when I walk into that place, this was the start of a long, fascinating conversation, in which I was ushered from shelf to shelf and table to table, and shown multiple tempting titles, many of them originally written in languages other than English.

I bought several, but one in particular stuck in my mind: Yun Ko-eun’s Art on Fire, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler. It was the premise that got me. Since I read the hilarious Lake Como by Srđjan Valjarević, translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić, for Serbia during my 2012 year of reading the world, I’ve had a weakness for novels that poke fun at art residencies. Indeed, beyond the titles I’ve featured on this blog, one of my favourite reads of this year was Ella Frears’s Goodlord, a book-length narrative poem in the form of an email to an estate agent, which features a section describing a disastrous experience at an artists’ retreat.

Art on Fire sounded like it was cut from similar cloth. Struggling artist turned food-delivery person An Yiji thinks her luck has turned when she is awarded a residency at the prestigious Robert Foundation in California. But there is a catch: the programme is overseen by Robert, a wonderdog who takes photographs and selects the participants, and at the end of each artist’s time at the Foundation, he chooses one piece they have created to be burned.

As the premise suggests, this is a novel that teeters on the surreal. So much about An Yiji’s experiences is recognisable – from the Californian wildfires that delay her collection from the airport to the lumbering mechanisms of the art world – and yet everything feels as though the contrast has been shunted up a notch or two, making the colours faintly cartoonish.

Nowhere is this more true than with the figure of Robert, the Foundation’s eponymous and unnervingly gifted dog, who communicates by means of a mysterious black box and several interpreters. He has very particular views on how artists should interact with him and writes An Yiji a series of passive-aggressive letters that keep her constantly on edge.

Coupled with the narrator-protagonist’s heightened mental state, this makes for an intense and often very funny read. An Yiji is so riddled with imposter syndrome that when the Robert Foundation’s director phones to offer her the placement, she assumes it’s a spam call. Perhaps as a result of the run of disappointments that have dogged her career, she tends to look for the worst in situations. To read her encounter with the skewed logic of the Foundation is to be taken into the fraught mindset many of us may have experienced during the height of the pandemic, when months of isolation made even the simplest things strange.

This unpeeling from reality allows Yun Ko-eun to show up the cracks in many of the things we take for granted. The uneasy relationship between art and commercialism comes under the spotlight, for example, when representatives from the nearby town of Q court An Yiji in the hopes that she will feature their businesses and settings in her work. There’s a brilliant interrogation of the concept of authenticity, which is approached from many angles and comes to a head through the fact that An Yiji’s story is being developed into a film by an actor she met on her way to the residency, who needs her to work with him and the director to decide the ending.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is the discussion of translation that runs throughout the pages. Robert’s approach to communication is intriguing: ‘While humans communicated with one another line by line […] Robert saved the entire space-time of a conversation in his head, like an enormous file transfer system.’ This means that there are several stages – and people – required to compress and reorder human utterances into messages he can digest. What’s more, although An Yiji speaks English, during their conversations she is required to speak through a Korean translator. She becomes enraged when she realises the intermediary is swapping her words for terms Robert prefers during their conversations, with the result that ‘phoenix’ becomes ‘Korean pigeon’ and ‘coffin’ becomes ‘supercar’.

Knowing that we are reading all this in Lizzie Buehler’s translation adds another level to the satire, making this a wonderful example of a book where the translation offers even more than the original.

And Art on Fire certainly offers plenty to start with. It is a rare instance of a deeply funny, feel-good book that has important, thought-provoking things to say about the world we inhabit. Reading it, I was reminded of the words of Eritrean writer Alemseged Tesfai, who told me about the use of humour in his work: ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target.’ Art on Fire hits its target repeatedly and gives us a lot of entertainment in the process. Highly recommended.

Art on Fire by Yun Ko-eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler (Scribe, 2025)

Thanks so much to everyone who has read my work, attended my events and bought my books this year. Your support, enthusiasm and suggestions play a huge part in keeping me going. If you’d like to join the free Incomprehension Workshop taster on Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 7.30pm GMT, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA#/registration

Wishing you all a very happy New Year and many wonderful reads!

Free incomprehension workshop taster

December 17, 2025 By in Events, My books Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Good news! If you’ve been wanting to try my incomprehension workshop, your chance has come! I’ll be offering a virtual taster session and chatting to super reader, blogger and all-round translation champion Marina Sofia at 7.30pm (UK time) on Tuesday 20 January 2026.

Over the past few years I’ve run the workshop with readers of all ages from 10 upwards around the world, most recently for the fourth time at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (pictured above). The sessions are usually ticketed or run in-house for organisations, so this is a rare opportunity to try it from the comfort of your own home for free.

If you haven’t heard of the incomprehension workshop, it’s the basis of my new book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-knowing. Prompted by the realisation that no-one can be an expert on all the world’s stories, it invites readers to play with how paying attention to what we don’t understand can help us read ourselves and our world better.

Playful, disruptive, warm and inclusive, this hour-long free event is for curious readers everywhere. Simply register here to join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA

My Trip to Greenland with Tété-Michel Kpomassie

December 1, 2025 By in Events, My books, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

As followers of this blog will know, my hero is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the author of the landmark travel memoir An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, which was my Togolese choice for my 2012 project to read a book from every country. After the book was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021, Kpomassie and I became friends. In the final chapter of my new book, Relearning to Read, I write that I hope I will one day travel to Greenland with him.

This summer, I got to do just that, spending two weeks travelling along the west coast of the world’s largest island, stopping at many of the places Kpomassie first visited sixty years ago, courtesy of the expedition cruise company Aurora Expeditions (known as AE Expeditions in the UK).

It was the trip of a lifetime and a huge privilege to experience such an extraordinary place in such exceptional company. In addition to countless illuminating discussions about Kpomassie’s inspirations, and views on everything from writing and family to travel and alcohol, I got to meet some of his friends, including a woman who was four years old when Kpomassie first visited Greenland in 1965 and stayed with her family.

This weekend, the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper published my account of our adventure in their Travel supplement, giving it the honour of making it the cover story. You can find the online version here. I hope it will be the first of several kinds of storytelling that come out of this amazing adventure.

Book of the month: Alla Gorbunova

November 28, 2025 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg

Books come to me from many directions these days. Emails from publishers. Messages from readers of this blog. Suggestions from other writers. Reviews. Social media posts. Conversations with booklovers around the world.

In many cases, I hear about books before they are available. And while I try not to focus on the latest thing on this blog (because good books have long tails and I think the relentless emphasis on the new is one of the book industry’s many problems), I frequently find myself tempted to pre-order things that will be published months down the line.

So it often happens that a book arrives in the post or drops onto my e-reader seemingly out of the blue, long after I’ve forgotten who or what led me to be interested in it in the first place.

This latest book of the month is a good example. Some weeks ago, the cryptically titled (Th)ings and (Th)oughts appeared on my Kindle. As titles on e-readers cannot be easily flicked through or turned around, I started to read it with almost no idea what it was or where it was ‘from’ – much like the participants in my incomprehension workshops, who gamely tackle texts with no contextual information to anchor their reading.

If I’d had a physical copy, publisher Deep Vellum’s blurb on the back cover would no doubt have left me equally intrigued but perhaps none the wiser:

‘Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a clerk realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky; skeletons turn up in abandoned lots; a hapless everyman named Ivan Petrovich travels through a madcap Boschian afterlife, coming face-to-face with his own shortcomings, but failing, time after time, to get it right.’

‘The only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane?’ Surely it’s not possible for someone living inside Russia today (as the little I can find about Gorbunova online suggests she is) to write such things?

In fact, Gorbunova goes a lot further than the blurb suggests, depicting Putin with horns in one story and engaging in a range of reflections on evil and corruption that make little secret of their targets. In one of the Ivan Petrovich pieces, the title hero is tasked with interviewing students and awarding marks according to what bribes have been offered.

As the Russianness of the text began to swim into focus, these things started to challenge my reading. As I explore in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read – in which I discuss my correspondence with Alemseged Tesfai, a writer in Eritrea, widely believed to be one of the most restricted and censored societies on earth – reading a book from a place that we believe has active state censorship can make strange things happen in our minds. The knowledge that the words on the page might not be freely expressed or might have exposed their author to risk has a disruptive impact. As I read (Th)ings and (Th)oughts, I veered between fear for Gorbunova’s safety and incredulity at what she had got away with, which then made me suspicious of whether she has special privileges and is a kind of protected state artist or whether the collection is a form of double bluff, a cynical attempt to convince naïve Westerners like me that the Russian government is much more open and less restrictive than I’ve been led to believe. I found myself reading through the eyes of Putin’s censors as I imagine them to be, on the lookout for subversive statements and turns of phrase, struggling to relax into the text.

Even the discovery that the original collection was published in Saint Petersburg in 2017 when the situation certainly appeared rather different did little to ease my mind. I thought of a conversation I had recently with Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil and translator Joshua Freeman, whose powerful memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night I featured earlier this year. One of the mechanisms the Chinese government often employs is retrospective bans, rendering certain statements unacceptable after the fact and arresting writers for books that have been published with no problem years before. Surely a similar risk could menace Gorbunova here?

It’s testament to Gorbunova’s writing, and Elina Alter’s translation, that the storytelling is strong enough to drown out this noise. This is, in part, due to something she shares with Alemseged Tesfai – a love of and gift for humour. ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target,’ Tesfai told me.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts seems to take a similar approach. Many of the stories have an absurdist slant that reminds me of the work of Nikolai Gogol. Others trade off their brevity, pulling out the rug from under their characters so that the piece ends with a bathetic thud. In addition, Gorbunova seems to relish mismatching situations and registers to wring humour out of them. From the psychoanalyst drafting a memo to advise clients on how to navigate the ‘difficult circumstances’ that come from being consigned to hell for eternity to the angel handing out iPads and iPhones, there is a mischievous thread of linguistic playfulness woven through this collection.

Yet this lightheartedness is by no means lightweight. A deep understanding of human psychology underpins the pieces so that characters are often at their most relatable when they are behaving most perversely. Mishenka the Contrarian is a great example – a man who because of the cruelties he has witnessed, has made an art of transforming ‘acorns of suffering into the gold of gladness’. I also loved the brief portrait of the art critic N, who risks blowing up his life by posting everything he’s always wanted to say on Facebook.

Through it all runs a sense of affectionate cynicism. Things will probably turn out for the worst, the stories seem to be saying, but it might not happen. And we’ve got to play the cards we’re dealt. Life goes on and we are all part of it, all sitting in an ‘auditorium filled with laughter – a laughter heard since the beginning of the world, as people laugh at the shame and suffering of the flesh – involuntary, helpless laughter, mixed with fear.’

Storytelling may be imperfect, compromised and subject to suppression and malign influence, but it is the best thing we have, even, and perhaps especially, when it is frustrated. The final piece portrays an orphanage filled with poets, a few of whom go on to work for a literary publication:

‘The magazine was published once every seven years on clumsily pasted-together sheets of fragile, yellowing paper, in a run of seven issues, which were all ritually torn apart and scattered over the sea unread, and it was called Hope.’

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2025)

Picture: ‘Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg’ by Pedro Szekely on flickr.com

Book of the month: Bachtyar Ali

October 30, 2025 By in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m very fortunate to receive messages from readers and writers around the world telling me about books I might like to read. Many of the titles I’ve featured on this blog are the result of conversations with people in parts of the planet from which we English speakers rarely hear stories. Examples include: Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame, sent to me by Colin after a discussion with a bookseller at Libraria Dukagjini in Pristina, Kosovo; and The Golden Horse, the manuscript translation of which was emailed to me by author Juan David Morgan after it was recommended to me by the Panama Canal on Twitter. (Yes, really.)

Sometimes, however, I’m lucky to stumble across amazing stories from elsewhere closer to home. This latest Book of the month is a case in point: a few weeks ago, I spotted a new shop on the Old High Street near where I live in Folkestone, UK. It was, according to a sign in the window, a bookshop, gallery and publisher. Intrigued, I went inside and got talking to Goran Baba Ali, an author and co-founder of Afsana Press, which seeks to publish stories that have a direct relation to social, political or cultural issues in countries and communities around the world.

After a pleasant chat, I bought one of their titles, The Last Pomegranate Tree by Kurdish writer Bachtyar Ali, translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, and headed home. I was excited to read the book but also a little nervous. I really hoped it was good. It could be a little awkward the next time I bumped into Goran otherwise…

The novel begins with the release of 43-year-old peshmerga fighter Muzafar from a desert prison after 21 years. Yearning to reconnect with his son Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was arrested, he embarks on a quest to discover what happened to the boy. In so doing, he confronts the horrors visited upon his homeland and compatriots, the truth about love, loss and compassion, and what it means to be human.

Magical realism is a term I treat with some suspicion. In certain contexts, it can be used by critics to lump together and diminish anything in stories from elsewhere that doesn’t conform to certain Western norms. It is a term that has been applied to this book by some reviewers and I can see why: the story features many extraordinary creations and happenings. There is a character with a glass heart. There are women with hair that tumbles, Rapunzel-like, from windows down to the ground. The rules of the world are liable to tilt and twist. But in Ali’s hands, these happenings do not feel curious, exotic or strange, but rather expressions of deep truths, ‘that something always remained unexplained’, that when you live in a world where everything can be taken from you nothing is impossible.

One of the first things about this book that thrilled me (and there were many), was the beauty of the writing. Ali and Abdulrahman’s prose glitters with exquisite imagery. The pomegranate tree of the title stands on a mountaintop, ‘which rises up above the clouds like an island surrounded by silver waves’. Muzafar’s former friend Yaqub has ‘a strange gentleness in his words, as if you were standing near a waterfall and the wind was spraying the water towards you or you were asleep under a tree and the breeze had awoken you with a kiss’. Upon gaining his freedom, Muzafar ‘felt like a fish that had leapt back into the water from a fisherman’s net, its heart still filled with the recent shock of its probable death’.

This beautifully direct, expressive prose carries brilliant insights. Many of them centre on the enmeshment of humanity with all beings, ‘that the earth and life are a single interconnected whole’. Some reveal the mechanisms we use to deny this and insulate ourselves from others’ suffering. One of the sharpest examples of this is a passage in which a character advocating for the marginalised streetseller community is interviewed by a journalist:

‘That night by the fire, the journalist spoke about the wealth of agriculture and the yield of livestock, but Saryas spoke about the neglected and forgotten wealth of the thousands of abandoned children who found themselves on the streets from the age of four. The journalist talked about the charm of the cities, of clean pavements and the right of drivers to sufficient space for cars, but Saryas talked about the lost beauty of those children, himself included, who were forced to wash in filthy swamps because they had no access to clean water. The journalist argued for the return of the villagers to the countryside, Saryas for the return of people to a decent life.’

The writing is so powerful here. You can hear the conversation unfolding. The shift in register between the presentation of the two speakers’ statements shows us how they miss each other, the distance between them, and the way privilege and partisanship deafen those who imagine themselves openminded and fair.

Time marches to a beat that will be unfamiliar to some Western readers in this novel. Instead of the clockwatching chronology of many anglophone stories, there is a sense of a larger scope. A kind of deep time is at work, in which individual human destinies are only small parts of a much larger picture. ‘A person is a star that does not fall alone,’ reflects Muzafar. ‘Who knows where the echo will reverberate when we leave this earth? Perhaps someone will rise from our ashes in another time and realise they have been burned by the flame of our fall.’

The storytelling is similarly expansive. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that we readers are in the story too, cast as fellow refugees on a ferry Muzafar is taking to England in an effort to complete his quest. We are listening to Muzafar, whose account loops back on and contradicts itself, dented by his preoccupations and fears.

The effect is marvellous. This is honestly one of the best books I have read in a long time – so humane, so moving, so engrossing and so beautiful. To me, it is a reminder that we can find extraordinary, underrepresented voices anywhere. I live in a small town on the south coast of the UK and there is someone publishing world-class Kurdish literature a few minutes’ walk from my house.

The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman (Afsana Press, 2025; US first edition Archipelago Books, 2023)

News: São Tomé and Príncipe collection published after 13 years

October 22, 2025 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that happened during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country (and there were many extraordinary things) involved the small African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe.

Of the 11 or so UN-recognised countries that had no commercially available literature in English translation at the time, this proved by far the trickiest to source a book from. So much so that, as you can read in my original blog post, in the end a team of nine volunteers translated A casa do pastor, a collection of short stories by Santomean-born writer Olinda Beja, especially for me.

Now, 13 years later, that collection of short stories, is finally available to buy in English. Edited by leading Spanish and Portuguese translator Margaret Jull Costa OBE, one of the generous nine volunteers who answered my 2012 appeal, it has just been published by new Canadian indie Arquipélago Press.

The creation of this translation remains one of the most heartwarming and encouraging examples I’ve encountered of how stories can bring us together. It is wonderful to see these beguiling tales finally available in the world’s most published language.

As I say in my foreword to the book: ‘every so often, I receive a message asking if the collection of stories I read for São Tomé and Príncipe back in 2012 is available to buy in English. It is now my great joy to be able to answer: Yes, here it is.’

The Shepherd’s House by Olinda Beja, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, translated from the Portuguese by Yema Ferreira, Ana Fletcher, Tamsin Harrison, Margaret Jull Costa, Clare Keates, Ana Cristina Morais, Robin Patterson, Ana Silva and Sandra Tavares (Arquipélago Press, 2025)

Publication day: Relearning to Read

October 1, 2025 By in My books Tags: , , , , , , , 15 Comments

It’s out! My fourth book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, officially hits the shelves today. It’s available worldwide in English and can be ordered through all the usual channels and bookshops, as well as directly through my publisher’s website.

Drawing on the interactions I’ve had through this blog and through the reading workshops I’ve been running for the last four years, it explores how embracing not-knowing can enrich our reading of ourselves and our world.

Each chapter takes an extract from a different book likely to be outside most anglophone readers’ comfort zones as a launchpad for exploring themes such as how do we read books written from political viewpoints or based on religious views we don’t share? What do we do if we don’t know if a story is funny? And why might taste sometimes lead us astray? I hope it’s playful, mischievous, a bit subversive and thought-provoking.

In the spirit of this, the book comes in three slightly different covers, reflecting the fact that there is more than one way of reading. If you order one, you won’t know what you’re going to get! And as a bonus, Renard Press is running a promotion: if you add Relearning to Read and the signed, limited-edition version of my novel Crossing Over to your basket on their website, and use the coupon ‘relearning’, you’ll get the novel half price. The offer runs until the end of October, so hurry if you like the sound of this.

Every book will have its pound of flesh – at least that’s my experience. This one certainly had some twists and turns in the early days of developing the idea. Once I had the form clear in my mind, however, the writing process was a joy.

There’s been some wonderful feedback. We’ve already had an international rights inquiry from a publisher in another territory. (If you would be interested in translating or publishing the book in another language, please drop Will at Renard Press a line.) Relearning to Read has already been included on the syllabus of a university course in the UK and I’ve been invited to speak about it at festivals in the UK, India and Hong Kong.

What’s more, I’ve been particularly thrilled to see writers I admire supporting the book with generous endorsements. These include superstar translator and novelist Anton Hur, who called Relearning to Read ‘a lively discussion on how to read books from around our increasingly fractured world – and how to live within the chaos,’ and novelist, professor, translator and former English PEN president Maureen Freely, who wrote:

‘Living as we do in the golden age of surveillance marketing… it has become ever more difficult to negotiate uncertainty – in life as on the page. With this beautifully imaginative guide, Ann Morgan makes an eloquent case for reading beyond the bounds of our understanding, not just to broaden our horizons, but to better understand ourselves. I shall be taking it to my next book group! I urge you to do the same.’

Not everyone has been impressed, however. When I told my eight-year-old that my fourth book was being published today, she pulled a face. ‘What? You mean you’ve only written four books in your adult life?’ she said.

Still, I hope other family members approve. In particular, my Dad. Sadly I can’t ask him: he died unexpectedly as I was preparing to write the final chapter, and this changed the shape of the ending a little. One of the earlier chapters also features the story of how his father, a native Welsh speaker, moved into the English-speaking world. I hope Dad would have enjoyed reading it.

Certainly Dad would have enjoyed the international angle. Travelling was one of the things he most wanted to do in retirement. He had renewed his passport a few weeks before he died and was looking forward to several trips.

I have dedicated Relearning to Read to his memory. As it sets off around the world, it makes me smile to think that, in a way, Dad is travelling with it too.

Book of the month: Ning Ken

September 25, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:

‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’

The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.

On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.

Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.

In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’

In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.

Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’

Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)

What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.

This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’

The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.

Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)