PEN Translates Award to Muhsin Al-Ramli’s
‘The
President’s Gardens,’
Translated by
Luke Leafgren
BY MILYNXQUALEY
PEN Translates has announced its Autumn 2016
award-winners, which include Iraqi writer Muhsin al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens, translated
by Luke Leafgren, and The Accusation, a short-story collection smuggled
out of North Korea:
The President’s Gardens, forthcoming from MacLehose next April,
was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013.
Iraqi novelist Ali Badr, who chose The President’s Gardens as
one of his favorites of 2012, said that the novel “”gives a hard critical
examination of the power held by the Saddam Hussein, and after, the epoch of
American occupation: the civil strife, unlawful killing, torture and
ill-treatment, kidnapping and hostages…and sheds some specific reflection,
albeit in fictional guise, on the nature of the authoritarianism.”
As MacLehose writes:
On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find
the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop.
One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in
Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated.
How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so
many? What did he do to deserve such a death?
The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with
Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable
stories to tell.
It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the
Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle.
It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the
festering scorn of his daughter.
And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of The
President’s Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign
of terror.
Ten titles were selected for the Autumn
2016 round of PEN Translates awards. Other awarded authors include North Korean
author Bandi’s The
Accusation, a short-story collection apparently smuggled out
of North Korea, and translated by Deborah Smith (Serpent’s Tail); Ismail
Kadare for The Traitor’s Niche (Harvill Secker), translated by John
Hodgson; and Alain Mabanckou for Black
Moses (Serpent’s
Tail), translated by Helen Stevenson.
Al-Ramli moved to Spain in 1995, where
he did his PhD and continues to make his home. Al-Ramli’s Fingers
of Dates (2009) met
with wide acclaim and was longlisted for the 2010 International Prize for Arabic
Fiction. It was also released in Spanish as Dedos de Datiles and
English as Dates on My Fingers, also translated by Leafgren.
English PEN is now accepting applications from UK publishers for the next round of PEN Translates awards. The deadline for submissions
is December 12, 2016.
