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)

*Give away* The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation

September 18, 2025 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Many of those I interact with about books through this project, both virtually and at my Incomprehension Workshops, are young people. Even now, all these years after I set out to read the world, I sometimes find my inbox flooded with messages from students whose teacher has asked them to write to me recommending a story. A while ago, I received a wonderful video from a young boy in Beijing advising me to read a book that explained why tomatoes can sometimes be quite dangerous.

Statistics bear out the enthusiasm for reading internationally that I’ve seen among the young: according to data compiled by Nielsen for the Booker Prize Foundation, ‘book buyers under the age of 35 account for almost half (48.2%) of all translated fiction purchases in the UK‘.

So it was a delight to be invited to contribute an essay to a new collection celebrating the importance and joy of reading for children and young people. The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation is the second such anthology put together by editor Jennie Orchard. Like the first volume, The Gifts of Reading, it was inspired by an essay by the UK nature writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the foreword to this new collection.

Other contributors include such household names as William Boyd, Michael Morpurgo, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Imtiaz Dharker and Horatio Clare, and all royalties go to Room to Read and U-Go. Founded by John Wood, these organisations promote literacy and education for girls and women. Indeed, U-Go’s aim is to fund the university education of 100,000 young women in the world’s lowest income countries.

We celebrated the UK publication of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation with a launch at London’s Daunt Bookshop. Also published in the US and Australia, the collection is widely available.

BUT I have one copy that I am happy to sign and send anywhere in the world. If you’d like it, simply message me or leave a comment below telling me about a book you gave or received that was important to you.

Looking forward to hearing your stories!

Photos © Amber Melody

Book of the month: Nauja Lynge

August 29, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).

It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!

In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.

If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)

But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.

Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.

From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?

Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.

This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:

It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.

The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.

Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.

Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.

As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.

There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.

However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’s The People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?

For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.

Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)

Book of the month: M.G. Sanchez

July 28, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back.

He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula). It was, he told me, an amalgam of Spanish and English with bits of Maltese and Genoese thrown in. In fact, the literary scene in Gibraltar was similarly fascinating, a kind of experiment in answering the question of how small a population you need to establish a literary culture. 

Yorkshire-based M.G. Sanchez is a key player in this, having co-founded Patuka Press, which publishes anthologies of Gibraltarian writing. Indeed, several of Sanchez’s own books feature Llanito and his most recent has both an English and a Llanito edition. The title that caught my eye on his back catalogue, however, was Diary of Victorian Colonial and other Tales, my latest Book of the month.

Originally published in 2008 through Rock Scorpion Books, a now-defunct publishing forum that Sanchez also founded after he struggled to find an outlet for Gibraltarian work, Diary is Sanchez’s second work of fiction. It features one novella and two shorter works that, according to its marketing material centre on ‘themes of emotional and geographical displacement’.

The title work is the most ambitious piece. Chronicling the return of ex-convict Charles Bestman to Gibraltar, the land of his birth, in the nineteenth century, it explores what it means to belong and how history can entrap us in many senses. After this comes ‘Intermission’, a stream-of-consciousness account of a UK-based magazine publisher’s snap decision to give up the world and enter a French monastery. Last and, for my money, least is ‘Roman Ruins’, the story of an Italian lawyer’s attempt to save a homeless Kosovan man.

Voice is one of the key strengths of Sanchez’s writing. The first two pieces lift off the page thanks to compelling, energetic and distinctive first-person narrators. The diary form is not easy to pull off and sustain for a whole work of fiction, and it’s credit to Sanchez that Bestman’s account is engaging, and peppered with telling observations. Meanwhile, the would-be monk of ‘Intermission’ is often extremely funny. His claim that the notorious British serial killer Fred West looked ‘a bit like an ugly Tom Jones’ had me laughing out loud. Although his spiel is occasionally repetitious and tips over into raw ranting on a few occasions, lines like this meant that I was more than happy to stay with him for the ride. There is a rich, mischievous seam to the writing in the first two-thirds of the book that put me in mind of anglophone authors such as Helen DeWitt and C.D. Rose, as well as the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.

It’s also fascinating to see colonialism and Britishness discussed from fresh angles, as Sanchez does in the first two pieces. There is a Trojan horse element to many of the passages, with certain ostensibly harmless or familiar formulations being used to smuggle in sentiments that challenge the status quo or reframe ideas. Some of these, such as the magazine publisher’s reflections on political correctness gone mad, now feel a little dated, but many are still disconcertingly fresh.

There’s a meta element to the title work too. At the end of the text, an editor’s note informs us of the way in which the diary was discovered and praises Rock Scorpion Books for publishing it after it was rejected by many other outlets. Finding a way to be heard and recognised is, it seems, part of the story.

Language has a big role to play in this. Llanito and Spanish feature in dialogue in the opening piece, while French appears in ‘Intermission’, and Italian and Serbian ring the changes in the final story. Multilingualism and pluralism are part of the fabric of this literary world, with Sanchez rarely choosing to translate on the page. Bewilderment and codeswitching are de rigueur.

All that said, the final story is an odd fit in this collection. Whereas the first two pieces complement each other tonally, stylistically and thematically, ‘Roman Ruins’ feels as though it is out on a limb. From the retail blurb, I see that a story called ‘The Old Colonial’ is listed in its place in the collection, and I wonder if a late need for a substitution has led to this piece being shoehorned in.

Certainly, there is a stilted, slightly unfinished quality to it. Characters often seem to exist to make arguments rather than to act in their own right, with several conversations featuring long expositions of the history of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities committed during and since its collapse (although as I write this, I’m conscious that numerous literary traditions have a much higher tolerance for political and historical discussion than is generally accepted in anglophone literature – it may be that Gibraltarian literature does too). Coming after the mischievous, subversive antics of the first two pieces, the straightness of ‘Roman Ruins’ is hard to take. I also found the female lawyer less convincing than Sanchez’s male creations. All in all, the story felt uneven.

But then perhaps evenness isn’t necessarily a virtue, or a quality essential to every work or literary tradition. It may be that Sanchez and his fellow Gibraltarian writers are nurturing a literary culture that works according to other standards – one that has no need to appeal to the sensibilities of a citizen of the country that once colonised their homeland. Sanchez has since published numerous works that may have taken his writing in any number of directions. I’m intrigued to learn more.

Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales by M.G. Sanchez (Rock Scorpion Books, 2012)

Picture: ‘Gibraltar’ by John Finn on flickr.com

What is the future of English studies?

July 7, 2025 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event.

The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble?

But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled.

The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days.

This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them.

Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences:

  • Reading is…
  • The world is…
  • Stories are…

At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this:

  • Reading is boring
  • The world is crazy
  • Stories are exciting

It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me.

I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds.

Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more.

Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain.

There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University).

They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process!

I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories.

I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon!

Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com

Book of the month: Tahir Hamut Izgil

June 30, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells the story of his decision to flee his homeland, along with his wife and children, in the late 2010s, following decades of mounting discrimination and persecution of the Uyghur population in Xianjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China.

Through Izgil’s eyes, we live the experience of seeing your world contract to the point where there is no longer space for you to exist. The accounts of the imprisonments of many of Izgil’s friends and associates – often for minor or even unspecified breaches of the ever-shifting rules – are chilling and heartrending, yet it is the cruel absurdity of many of the directives that restrict everyday life that sticks in the mind. The requirement, for example, for Muslim clerics to participate in televised disco dancing competitions (and the brave attempt of one to embrace this insult as good exercise). Or the Looking Back Project, under which ‘many previous legal things had become illegal’, rendering authors vulnerable to being arrested for books that had been published with the censors’ blessing in previous years.

Perhaps most horrifying of all is the List of Prohibited Names, a sporadically updated inventory setting out which names may no longer be used. In light of this, anyone may suddenly find themselves banned from using the appellation by which they have been known all their lives. ‘A name is a person’s most personal possession,’ as Izgil, writing through Freeman, reflects. ‘If he cannot hold on to his own name, what hope does he have of keeping anything else?’

The way language is weaponised to curb and control is similarly disturbing. As the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Uyghurs grow ever tighter, seemingly innocuous words turn traitor. People called in for questioning are said to be taking ‘tea’, those removed to the concentration and re-education camps have been sent to ‘study’, if you have a black mark on your record, you are said to carry a ‘dot’.

Uyghurs too, learn to bury their meaning to keep safe:

‘A political campaign was a “storm”, while innocent people caught up in mass arrests or in a Strike Hard Campaign were said to be “gone with the wind”. A “guest” at home often meant a state security agent. If someone had been arrested, they were “in the hospital”.

Yet, language is also a source of great joy and beauty in this book. As Freeman explains in his introduction, poetry is a way of life in Izgil’s homeland:

‘Verse is woven into daily life – dropped into conversation, shared constantly on social media, written between lovers. Through poetry, Uyghurs confront issues as a community, whether debating gender roles or defying state repression. Even now, I wake up many mornings to an inbox full of fresh verse, sent by the far-flung poets of the Uyghur diaspora for me to translate.’

Poetry is central to this memoir too. Several of Izgil’s poems appear. What’s more, there is a beautiful litheness and directness to the prose, which captures key moments in the story with memorable clarity. When Izgil’s wife, Marhaba, learns that after years of fighting bureaucracy the family have finally received the visas that will enable them to escape to the US, her face opens ‘like a flower’.

Because of the quality of the writing, we feel the Izqil family’s bravery and the loss that goes with uprooting yourself from all you know (including necessarily severing ties with those who stay behind for their safety). As the best writing does, the story speaks for itself, urging itself on the reader, making the pages fly past.

Nevertheless, as I read, I found a question surfacing repeatedly in my mind. There are many urgent and brilliant stories by writers from persecuted minorities in the world today. Most of them do not find homes with some of the English-speaking world’s biggest publishers as this one has (coming out through Penguin Random House on both sides of the Atlantic). If they make it into English at all, such stories are usually released by small presses, which, as I often say on this blog, are where most of the risky, exciting, boundary-pushing publishing happens these days. (Books like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s The Convoy, translated by Ruth Diver and published in February by Open Borders Press, for example.)

So what is it about this story that has enabled it to cut through?

I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the book paints the West in a relatively flattering light. Although Izgil likens the contempt of the Han Chinese authorities to the attitudes of European colonialists and quotes a friend saying they wish China would conquer the world because the rest of us are so ignorant about the realities they are facing, the US is a place of safety for Izgil. It is where he can finally taste freedom once more and thrive. I think this is a picture that fits with what many of us in the English-speaking global north would like to believe about our homelands.

The second is that the story necessarily reinforces certain narratives about China that happen to serve Western agendas. This portrayal of the Chinese authorities as harsh and unpredictable feels familiar and relatively comfortable. In this respect, although it may challenge other preconceptions, this book will resonate with significant aspects of many people’s prevailing world view.

This is not to call into question anything Izgil has written: the atrocities he describes are well documented. Nor is it to detract at all from the brilliance of this book. Rather, it is to say that this may be a story to which many in the English-speaking world may be able to listen to more easily than we can to comparable narratives that do not align with Western agendas so neatly.

If anything, this may make this book even more important. It may speak more directly and powerfully about the refugee experience to many anglophone readers because it will not invite the sort of resistance that can often arise when we read challenging books from elsewhere. By happening to echo ideas that feel familiar and safe, it may move us to deepen our sense of humanity and connection with those forced to leave their homelands.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman (Vintage, 2024)

Book of the month: Julian Maka’a

May 29, 2025 By in Book of the month, Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

This book came on my radar through fellow international bibliophile Suroor Alikhan, who kindly hosted me at an online event organised by the Hyderabad Literary Festival last year. A few weeks ago, she contacted me saying that she had found a website that she thought I’d be interested in, featuring a list of more than 100 books by Pacific Islanders.

I was intrigued. The Pacific Island nations were among the most difficult countries to source stories from during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. And although the criteria of the list’s compiler were a little different from mine – she included a number of titles by writers with Pacific Island heritage (including herself) – there were many fascinating-sounding works.

The book I’ve picked to feature – Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a from the Solomon Islands – didn’t strike me as the most satisfying of those I read from the list, but I found it interesting for several reasons.

The Solomon Islands are hard to source stories from: back in 2012, the best option I could find was The Alternative, a 1980s boarding school novel. So I was curious about what this much more recent short story collection would be like.

My interest was also piqued by Maka’a’s statement on the back cover that the collection – which he self-published in 2012, 27 years after his first collection was brought out by the University of the South Pacific – draws on various aspects of his professional life, including efforts to build staff understanding about sexual reproductive health in his capacity as the manager of Wantok FM, part of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation. This is reflected in frank descriptions of the treatment of and stigmas around sexually transmitted diseases in several of the earlier pieces.

As with many of the books I read ‘from’ Pacific Island nations in 2012, the collection seems written with a consciousness of needing to represent its nation. ‘The themes and general messages [of the stories] are different and varied,’ writes Maka’a, ‘but the one thing that is common is they reflect what life is like in Solomon Islands’.

To an outsider like me, this manifests itself most tellingly in the glimpses into local beliefs and customs, presented most richly in the title story, in which a legend about a philandering man ritually killed for breaking taboos haunts the narrator.

The emphasis on education, so apparent in The Alternative, is also strong in Maka’a’s work. The most ambitious piece in the collection, a three-part story called ‘Is This Fair?’ centres on a teenage pregnancy at a boarding school and makes clear the sacrifices that the nation’s geography and economic situation demand of families keen to give their children opportunities. Some eight thousand students drop out of education every year, we learn, and just getting to school at the start of term often requires many stomach-churning hours in a boat.

As is so often the case in books from elsewhere, it is the assumptions and things taken for granted that prove most intriguing. One of the central characters in ‘Is This Fair?’, for example, seems not to bat an eyelid at the notion that her parents will decide her career path, as set out in a letter her mother sends her:

‘In her brief letter which she wrote in language and pijin, she explained that she and dad always discussed about me. About the future that I would give them from my education – benefits to cut a long story short. She said they had differences in the job I should take up after I graduate in form five. My mother said she wanted me to become a nurse – that way I would help her when she gets sick or even my father. My father on the other hand wanted me to be a teacher.’

For all its interest, however, this book is a challenging and occasionally bewildering read. My knee-jerk reaction is to pin this on the fact that it has probably not been through the editorial processes of many traditionally published books in mainstream anglophone literature, with the result that there are structural idiosyncrasies, and spelling and grammatical oddities that are sometimes distracting. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the character names between the different parts of ‘I Am Fair?’ that make it hard to follow. There is also an abruptness to certain emotional shifts and transitions that risk interrupting the flow of the story.

But I’m also aware that what I read as errors or idiosyncrasies may in many cases not be considered as such by readers in the Solomon Islands. There, a different form of English is used, one in which certain formulations and word uses that sound odd to me may be customary. Similarly, shifts between registers and emotional states that jar for me may simply reflect different norms or storytelling traditions beyond my experience feeding into this book.

Regardless of how I read it, what remains is a sense of urgency. A desire to communicate. A hand stretched out from this place we in the UK rarely hear of, seeking connection and the chance to convey something. This is me, this book says. This is us. This is where we are.

Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a (Xlibris, 2012)