French Magazine “Lui” offers a brief review of Alwan’s Beavers, February
A rich Saudi man, overwhelmed by his family of morons and disenchanted mistress, leaves for America, the best place to host his melancholy. On a riverbed in Oregon, he meets a beaver, and seeks to find his way between contemplation, alcohol and personal development meetings. A rare and brilliant take on the midlife crisis – Arab style.
French original below
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Un riche Saoudien accablé par sa famille de débiles et sa maîtresse désabusée part pour l’Amérique, pays plus propre à accueillir son …

Below is an excerpt, read the whole interview here.
(…)
Youssefl Rakha: I go on about this so as to put you in the picture: the nineties, when I started showing my writing to people—that’s when the clash between younger prose poets and older guardians of the poetic ancien régime took place. This is partly of course what The Crocodiles is about. So, when I started writing, I found myself writing prose poems though I thought I wanted to write short stories.

We’re very proud to share this news: The 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be awarded this week to Sinan Antoon for the translation of his own novel The Corpse Washer, published by Yale University Press.
 Paula Haydar is highly commended for her translation of June Rain by Jabbour Douaihy, published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.
Both June Rain and The Corpse Washer are on RAYA’s list of represented titles.
 The judging panel comprised literary translator and joint winner of the 2013 Prize Jonathan Wright, translator and writer Lulu Norman, broadcaster and writer Paul Blezard, and Banipal editor and trustee Samuel Shimon. They met in December 2014 …

Mohamad Hasan Alwan’s novel “Beavers” (Al Qondos, Dar al saqi) was recently published in France by le Seuil.