Almost as soon as it was published in 1990, Ahmed Bouanani’s great novel, L’Hôpital, disappeared. Not until two decades later, in 2012, was it re-released in both Morocco and France to international acclaim. Bouanani (1938–2011) was a Moroccan writer, poet, filmmaker, and illustrator, and a leading figure of the Moroccan intelligentsia of his time. Now Bouanani’s works The Shutters and The Hospital are appearing for the first time in English at last. With: Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and residency center for artists, scholars, and writers located on the outskirts of Marrakech. He currently lives in New York, and teaches at The Cooper Union. Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island, and the co-owner of Riffraff Bookstore. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright for her work on Ahmed Bouanani. Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood. Her book Accidental Gods is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in the US and Granta in the UK.
New York City, NY; NYC