Yasmin Zaher
Abolish the Categories
Yasmin Zaher
I must begin with my own condition. I’m a Palestinian writer and a citizen of Israel, my mother tongue is Arabic, I write in English, and I live in France. My novel does not fit in the category of Arab literature, because it is not written in Arabic; nor can it be American or English literature, because I am not American or British. Classifying it as French literature would be...
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Yasmin Zaher
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
