About
Graham Liddell is a writer, translator, and scholar of modern Middle Eastern literature. His translations from Arabic have appeared in World Literature Today, The Stinging Fly, and ArabLit Quarterly, among other publications. In 2022, he edited Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration, a book-length issue of the literary translation journal Absinthe. A recent recipient of a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Graham wrote a dissertation comparing the ways contemporary Arab and Afghan migration experiences are narrated in literary fiction and the asylum process. He currently teaches world literature and writing at Hope College in Michigan.
Featured Work
Absinthe 28: Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration
Absinthe 28: Orphaned of Light features contemporary literature of migration translated from and to Arabic. In short stories, creative nonfiction essays, poetry, and selections from novels, a multiplicity of migration experiences is brought to the fore: life in diaspora, undocumented labor, refugeehood, human trafficking, internal displacement, exile.
This issue brings together names familiar to readers of Arabic literature in translation, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Saadi Youssef, with writers making their English-language debuts, such as Dearborn, MI-based Kurdish Iraqi poet Gulala Nouri and Libyan novelist Mohamad Alasfar. Likewise, the issue includes veteran translators Marilyn Booth, Nancy Roberts, and Khaled Mattawa alongside newcomers, several of them graduate students at the University of Michigan.
Each piece is accompanied by a translator’s reflection that meditates on the work’s themes as well as the creative process of translation, and the issue’s poetry is presented in a side-by-side Arabic-English format.
Absinthe 28 comes to us at a time when, according to the UN, one in every 78 people on earth is displaced. This collection serves as a reminder that translation and migration are inextricably linked.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- Humanities in Translation Prize: Honorable Mention — Northwestern University Press
- ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award — University of Michigan
