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Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation: in conversation
with Sawad Hussain, Susanne Abou Ghaida and Marcia Lynx Qualey
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading in partnership with Outside in World, are delighted to announce the latest event in their seminar series on translation for children
Thursday 23rd April at 5 pm – 6.30 pm UK time. This online webinar is free and open to all who register here
Despite a huge, diverse base of speakers and vibrant publishing industries, relatively little Arabic-language literature is available in translation to readers of English. This is particularly true of books for children and young adults. Drawing on many collective years of experience in the field, our speakers will talk about what kind of Arabic-language YA is getting translated into English, who is translating and publishing these works, and what might be behind some of these trends. They will offer us a window into the scouting and pitching processes, discussing the specific challenges and opportunities that they face in translating children’s books from Arabic to English. We will learn about advocacy initiatives such as ArabKidLitNow! and the Bila Hudood digital literary festival, hear about what titles they have translated recently, and what they are hoping to translate next.
Speakers:
Sawad Hussain is a PEN Award-winning translator from Arabic. She has been shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the National Book Award for Translation, and longlisted for the Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing, among others. A former co-chair of the Translators’ Association in the UK, Sawad has also served as a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. In 2024, she became the first translator-in-residence for Wasafiri, and was the Spring 2025 translator-in-residence at PIIRS, Princeton University.
Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly, for which she won an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. Her personal focus is on translated literature for young readers, including YA, middle grade, and chapter books. Her most recent is a co-translation — with Sawad Hussain — of Maria Daadouch’s I Want Golden Eyes.
Susanne Abou Ghaida is a researcher specialised in Arabic children’s and adolescent literature. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her doctoral research was on the contemporary Arabic adolescent novel. From 2023 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Aix-Marseille University, where she was carrying out research on The 13 Devils, an Arab espionage/adventure series for adolescents. She has written on a number of subjects, including multicultural picture books; disability; Arabic adolescent literature and reading response. She is currently the Vice President of the Young Adult Studies Association and Senior Editor of the International Journal of Young Adult Literature.
Recording of Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations Webinar
In Case you missed the webinar on 'Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations’ in conversation with the leaders of the project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War, it is now available on the CBCP YouTube Channel
Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading in partnership with Outside in World, are delighted to announce the latest event in their seminar series on translation for children
Thursday 11 December at 5 pm – 6.30 pm UK. This online webinar is free and open to all. To join via MS Teams, please register here
We will be in conversation with the leaders of the project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War on the role of translations.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War, examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation.
In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.
Speakers:
Ekaterina Shatalova is a PhD fellow at Aarhus University, working on the project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.” Before turning to conflict and children’s books, she earned a Master’s degree in Victorian literature at Oxford University (2018), followed by Erasmus Mundus International degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture (2022). She is also a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. When not translating, she scouts and reviews books for international publishers and book organisations (IBBY, Children’s Books Ireland). Her recent article “Image of Migrants and Refugees in Contemporary Russian Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Alexey Oleynikov’s Works” (2024) was published in Filoteknos.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a Doctor of Science (Social Pedagogy), a professor at the Department of Social Technologies (Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine) and a researcher of the MSCA4Ukraine project DaR:ua “Dialogues and Reading: Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark). Her research focuses on non-formal education for excluded groups, youth work and youth policy based on Council of Europe standards and approaches, shared reading and children’s books in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on post-Soviet Russian book design and print culture The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (New Directions in Book History, Palgrave, 2017). Her main research areas are print and media history of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras with a second strand in children’s books. Her current research project focuses on children’s book publishing in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Browse our Book Reviews, Articles , Booklists and Listen to our Shared Stories. You can also find out about the OIW Collection of Children’s Books in Translation at the University of Portsmouth Library and the Webinars in partnership with the University of Reading or read about our past work - Reading Round the World with international authors and illustrators and our two Reading the Way projects on inclusive and accessible Books – Reading the Way Research, and Reading the Way2 or you can search our Information and Resources where you will find the OIW Translated Books Stats and reports on our past events and seminars.
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