The Words without Borders July 2017 issue “Divided Countries” includes an excerpt I’ve translated of A Crime in Ramallah by Palestinian author Abbad Yahya. In this excerpt, Noor – one of three narrators in the novel – remembers his adolescence in Palestine, marked by the second intifada. You can also listen to the extract on SoundCloud and read the original text in Arabic on the Words without Borders website.
The July 2017 issue also includes translations of recent work by writers appearing in London’s 2017 Shubbak festival of contemporary Arabic culture, as well as translations from Croatia, El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkey and Tibet.
My translation: A Crime in Ramallah by Palestinian author Abbad Yahya
About the author:
Abbad Yahya is a Palestinian writer from the West Bank. A sociologist by training, he previously worked as a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. As a journalist, he is editor-in-chief of the news and current affairs website Ultra Sawt. He has published four novels in Arabic: Blonde Ramallah (2012), Section 14 (2014), Public Telephone (2015), and A Crime in Ramallah (2016). Yahya’s A Crime in Ramallah was banned nationwide after the Palestinian Attorney General ruled that it “violated public decency and morality”; his safety threatened, Yahya has been unable to return home from a trip to Qatar. For more information, visit PEN International.
Written by RUTH AHMEDZAI KEMP
