C. P. Cavafy

Despite publishing little during his lifetime, Constantine P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, Κωνσταντίνος Πέτρου Καβάφης; 1863–1933) is considered the greatest modern Greek poet. He himself classified his poems into three categories: historical, usually depictions of classical antiquity; philosophical or instructive; and erotic, dealing with homosexual desire. All these are unified by Cavafy's distinctive voice, one that his friend E. M. Forster described as belonging to "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe" (Pharos and Pharillon, 1923).

Cavafy has been widely translated into English. Various editions of his collected works are available to borrow at the Internet Archive. Individual poems are available at several websites, such as Poetry Foundation. Additionally, the Onassis Foundation maintains a digital collection of his manuscripts and personal correspondence, accessible without a paywall.

Cavafy's work has inspired not only novelists such as Forster and poets such as W. H. Auden, but also painters such as David Hockney and musicians such as Leonard Cohen. His enduring influence has not heretofore made its mark on Literature Stack Exchange. Nor do we have any questions about the greek-language of the present day; all the questions with that tag are about works in classical Greek. It would be good to see Cavafy, and with him the modern language, represented on this site.

The Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

The great efflorescence of African-American culture known as the Harlem Renaissance occurred roughly a century ago. In music, painting, photography, theater, and literature, the artists and writers associated with the movement sought to depict the lived experiences of their community and define a distinct African-American identity. Their poetry, drama, essays, and novels shaped the thinking of the Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s.

Representative works of the movement include:

• The poetry of Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Countee Cullen (1903–1946), Claude McKay (1889–1948), and Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966)
• Novels such as Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Walter White's The Fire in the Flint (1924), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God (1937), and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Comedy: American Style (1933)
• Plays such as Wallace Henry Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem (1929) and Willis Richardson's The Broken Banjo (1925).

The works of Harlem Renaissance writers make interesting reading for several reasons, including but not limited to:

• Their intrinsic merit. Poems such as Hughes' "Harlem" pack a punch even to readers unaware of their specific social and political contexts.
• Their relationship to literary modernism. Writers like T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce were reshaping literary conventions at the same time that Harlem Renaissance writers were shaping a new canon. This leads to some rich lines of inquiry, for example around primitivism in the two movements.
• The way in which writers such as Hughes, Cullen, and McKay navigated their intersectional position as Black and queer.
• Their attempt to create an identity that was specifically African-American, connected both to Pan-African movements and to America as distinct from Europe.
• The insights they might provide into the current, fraught historical moment in the US.

These works are also readily accessible. As the links above demonstrate, writings from the period are out of copyright by now and easy to find online. For those who prefer physical copies, David Levering Lewis's anthology The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Viking, 1994) includes a good selection. At least in the US, it is inexpensive and readily available in public libraries.

Osama Alomar

Osama Alomar is a Syrian author living in the United States, who primarily writes "very short stories", a style that's perhaps more common in Arabic than in English. Many of his stories have been translated into English, usually by himself and C. J. Collins, who worked with him to translate as Alomar worked as a taxi driver.

The stories are usually only a few lines long, and quite surreal, but thought-provoking and may offer a new perspective on something. They also often have a cultural aspect or relate to Alomar's personal history, even in the few short lines of most of his works.

A number of his works can be found online (such as through JSTOR for those with access or other places) or can be purchased.

Native American and Canadian oral traditions

The treatment of native Canadians has been in the news quite a bit lately. I would like to propose the oral traditions, myths, and literature of native Americans and Canadians.

A few examples of books I was able to find on Amazon:

• Native American Folklore & Traditions by Elsie Clews Parson
• Lakota Sioux Legends and Myths: Native American Oral Traditions Recorded by Marie L. McLaughlin and Zitkala-Sa by Marie L. McLaughlin and Zitkala-Sa
• Indigenous Poetics in Canada

Literary Hoaxes

Every few years, the literary world becomes aware of a new hoax perpetrated on it. The persona of JT LeRoy and the fake memoir of James Frey are two relatively recent examples. Examples of literary hoaxes go back at least as far as the 5th century BCE, when Onomacritus inserted forgeries of his own devising into his edition of Musaeus's oracles.

Literary hoaxes sometimes retain influence even after the hoax is exposed, whether by the perpetrator or somebody else. Thomas Chatterton, for example, became a figure of great interest among the Romantics because of his tragic life and the role his faked 15th C. Rowley poems played in it. Sadly, another hugely influential hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, continues to circulate as part of the propaganda of anti-semitic, right-wing conspiracy theory groups.

The category of "literary hoax" raises interesting questions about truth in a creative context. Frey's so-called memoir, A Million Little Pieces, would still be a well-written and moving work if considered as fiction rather than memoir. Yet its being marketed as the latter, and the scandal that ensued when its fictitious nature was revealed, demonstrate that part of the value attributed to the world rested on a truth-claim that would be inoperative if it had been marketed as fiction. What does this tell us about the truth-value of a literary memoir as opposed to that of a work of fiction?

As a thought experiment, what would happen if we were to take a reader who was unaware of the scandal surrounding A Million Little Pieces and had her read the work as fiction? How would her response and evaluation change, compared to that of a similar reader (one similarly unaware of the scandal) who read it as memoir? By definition, creative writers indulge in world-building. What are the ways in which the presentation of the built world as fiction or as memoir determine how the reader responds to and evaluates the work?

The same holds true for poetry. If the Rowley poems are good poems, does that depend on their "really" being 15th C. poems? Evidently not, since the Romantics found them well worth reading anyway, and they continue to be anthologized in reputable collections.

There also seems to be a distinction in the reception of a literary hoax depending on whether it's exposed by a third party or by the hoaxer. Frey and Chatterton attracted opprobrium. But Rabindranath Tagore, as a very young man, passed off a pastiche of poems in the 15th C. – 17th C. Vaishnava Padavali tradition as the real article. After the sequence had been published and praised, he admitted that Bhanusingher Padavali was his own creation rather than a rediscovered older manuscript. He suffered no enduring blowback.

The category of literary hoax forces us to ask what the boundary is between creative writing and deception. This is an ancient question, going back all the way to Plato, who flat-out denied that there was any distinction. A topic challenge about literary hoaxes would provide Lit SE the chance to indulge in both theoretical questions about the nature of fiction, and discussions of specific instances of literary hoaxes.

(Posted on 26 November 2020.)

Native Australian stories and traditions

Historically experienced significant discrimination.

An example of a book is The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia by Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

(Posted on 23 May 2022.)

Stefan Żeromski

A Polish writer of short stories, novels, and plays, nominated 14 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, who died almost a century ago.

Some works available online:

• Two short stories, "Twilight" and "Temptation", translated into English in this collection.
• A novel, The Faithful River, available here in English translation.
• A novel Przedwiośnie (variously translated), available in the original Polish here.
• A novel, Ludzie Bezdomni (Homeless People), available in the original Polish here.

Edward Atiyah

A Lebanese-British author, who is perhaps better known for his non-fiction books on the politics and history of the Levant (and, in scientific circles, for being the father of the famous mathematician Michael Atiyah), but who has also written several novels. Some of these are set in his native land of Lebanon, and others are set in the UK where he settled and spent most of his life - his corpus of literature seems to reflect his own life and complex identity.

• Donkey From the Mountains / The Cruel Fire - available on Project Gutenberg - about a rich Lebanese villager in an unhappy family who commits a murder and tries to hide it.
• Lebanon Paradise - available on the Internet Archive - about a Lebanese girl who meets a Palestinian boy in a refugee camp.
• The Eagle Flies from England - about an alternate history where Napoleon Bonaparte was British.
• The Thin Line - a crime novel which has been adapted to film in Japanese and French.
• Black Vanguard - available on the Internet Archive - about characters caught between the societies of Sudan and Britain.

A topic challenge on his works would surely generate a lot of interesting content, with so many of his novels easily available to read and so many cultural and historical aspects to explore as well as the stories themselves.

Raffi

Nineteenth-century Armenian author. Real name Hakob Melik Hakobian, but wrote under the mononymous pen-name Raffi. According to Wikipedia:

He is considered one of the most influential and popular modern Armenian authors. His works, especially his historical novels, played an important role in the development of modern Armenian nationalism.

Some of his works are available online in English, including Khent’ë (The Fool), available here as a PDF, and Jalaleddin, available here from Wikimedia Commons. A collection of Armenian legends and poems on Project Gutenberg also contains some contributions by Raffi.

This site only has one armenian-language question so far - let's do something about that!

Nissim Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) established Indian poetry in English as a distinct postcolonial genre. Speaking broadly to the point of indefensibility, while previous Indian poets writing in English either trafficked in inept translations from the vernacular of their own works (Rabindranath Tagore) or served up an exoticized India full of snake charmers and sati (Sarojini Naidu), Ezekiel gave Indian poetry in English its own voice and identity. His own situation as urban, bilingual, and Jewish mirrored that of English in India: largely a language of the city, typically not spoken by monoglots, simultaneously assimilated and alien. This perhaps explains why he was able to pioneer a new idiom for Indian English poetry: sophisticated, mature, fully at home in its locale while also part of a long, cosmopolitan tradition.

Ezekiel's nine published volumes range from A Time To Change (1952) to Latter-Day Psalms (1982). The latter collection won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary honor. Ezekiel's poems are widely available online, for example at Poem Hunter and All Poetry. Oxford University Press has also published his Collected Poems, available for borrowing at the Internet Archive. Ezekiel also wrote four plays, not as celebrated as his poems.

We have had topic challenges on premodern Indian poets writing in English (Naidu) and poets of the post-Ezekiel generation (Arun Kolatkar). But having those without Ezekiel makes as much sense as having a kite and the requisite string without connecting the two. So far, we have had just one question, well-received, about an Ezekiel poem: "Philosophy". My answer to that question claims: "The last stanza of the poem strikes me as one of the greatest ever written." I stand by that assessment. Ezekiel has other poems as profound; he also has poems that are simultaneously affectionate and hilarious ("Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T.S."); deeply moving ("Communication"); and meta ("Poetry Reading"). Ezekiel isn't perfect—his portrayal of women, for example, is rather antithetical to modern sensibilities; but he is still capable of taking one's breath away by the sheer skill and depth of his verse.

Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād

While he is only for a single series of accounts from a single travel, these writings of an early Islamic traveller have influenced western cultural perception of the area he traveled in a way that would be nigh unimaginable:

He described the Volga Bulgars and the Rus People, and many of the things he wrote about the Rus have been wholesale adopted as what many people think of as Viking today. In fact, in some areas, he is seen as one of the most neutral sources about old norse culture, as contemporary Christian texts about norse people in Viking depict those as raider, bloodthirsty monsters and irredeemable heathens.

Sequels to or retellings of Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) has often been adapted into children's books and films. It has also inspired sequels and retellings that sometimes put the original story into a new perspective.

These sequels and retellings include the following:

• Daniel Defoe's lesser-known lesser-known sequel The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719).
• Defoe's Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720), which "consists of a series of essays written in the voice of the character Robinson Crusoe" (Wikipedia).
• The poems "Images à Crusoé" by Saint-John Perse (1909).
• Derek Walcott's poem "The Castaway" (1965).
• Michel Tournier's retelling Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or, The Other Island, 1967), which was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. The themes explored in this novel include civilization versus nature, and the psychology of solitude.
• Michel Tournier's adaptation of his 1967 novel for younger readers: Vendredi ou la Vie sauvage (1971).
• Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Crusoe in England".
• Derek Walcott's play Pantomime (1978).
• J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe (1986), which is told from the perspective of a woman who landed on the same island as "Cruso" and which focuses on themes of language and power.
• Patrick Chamoiseau's 2012 novel L'empreinte à Crusoé, which begins after Crusoe has already spent twenty years on the island.

This challenge would allow us to look at the Robinson Crusoe story from various points of view, including an post-colonialist angle, and to compare themes across works based on the same story.

The challenge would not include other examples of the robinsonade genre, such as The Swiss Family Robinson, or shipwreck stories generally.

Spanish Civil War literature

The Spanish Civil War was a bloody conflict that raged from 1936 - 1939, and indeed continues to divide the country even to this day.

The horror, however, gave rise to a rich outpouring of art and literature. Classic examples include Hemingway's account of the struggle, For Whom the Bells Tolls, Koestler's reminiscence of being imprisoned on death-row in Sevilla, Dialogue with Death (which informed his later work Darkness at Noon), Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, and of course Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Classic works by Spanish authors include The Family of Pascual Duarte by the Noel prizewinner Camilo José Cela, and The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea.

As well as these older works - which have the advantage of being easily available from the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg - the war has continued to inspire literature (see, for example, this Goodreads link). Contemporary Spanish works include the bestselling The Time in Between by María Dueñas, Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, and "the Spanish Dr Zhivago", The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes.

As the historian Paul Preston remarked:

It was like this Pandora’s box that had everything. You have got Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Mussolini, Franco, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Leon Blum, fascism, communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism – you name it, it was all there.

Despite all this richness, I only count six questions concerning it. I think it would be definitely worth raising it as a Topic Challenge.

The works of Anna Seghers (1900–1983)

The career of the German author Anna Seghers spanned 50 years. Her early works are typically considered examples of Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity. In the 1930s she went into exile; as a Jew and a member of the Communist Party, her life wasn't safe in the Third Reich. During her time in exile, she did not only do important organisational work but also wrote important examples of Exilliteratur, especially the novels The Seventh Cross and Transit. After World War II, she returned to German and eventually settled in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The works she published during this part of her life are typically associated with socialist realism.

Her works include the following.

• Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara – Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara (1928): Segher's debut novel, for which she was awarded the Kleist prize.
• Der Weg durch den Februar (1935), a novel inspired by the now almost forgotten February Uprising in Austria in 1934, which was put down by forces of the authoritarian right-wing government of Engelbert Dollfuss. The novel was republished in July/August 2024.
• Das siebte Kreuz – The Seventh Cross (1939) is a well-known example of Exillteratur but the first complete English translation was published as recently as 2018.
• Transit (1944): Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll considered this Seghers's most beautiful novel.

(03/08/2024)

The Epic of Koroghlu

We haven't had a mythical topic challenge for a while, so here's my proposal for what could be described as the national epic of the Turkic peoples. From Wikipedia:

The Epic of Koroghlu is a heroic legend prominent in the oral traditions of the Turkic peoples [...] It was often put to music and played at sporting events as an inspiration to the competing athletes. Koroghlu is the main hero of an epic with the same name in Azerbaijani, Turkmen and Turkish as well as some other Turkic languages. The epic tells about the life and heroic deeds of Koroghlu as a hero of the people who struggled against unjust rulers. The epic combines the occasional romance with Robin Hood-like chivalry. [...] spread widely in these geographical regions leading to emergence of its Turkmen, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Crimean Tatar, Georgian, Kurdish, and Armenian versions. The story has been told for many generations by the "bagshy" narrators of Turkmenistan, fighter Ashik bards of Azerbaijan and Turkey, and has been written down mostly in the 18th century.

This sounds really fascinating: one can read the story itself, commentaries on it, and meta information about its history and spread. It would be interesting to see Q&A about its textual-history and how it's spread to different languages and cultures, as well as about the content of the epic itself. A quick glance at Google Scholar shows that (unsurprisingly) there have been many academic studies of this work.

From here, on translations:

Karl Reichl (University of Bonn, Germany) notes that: 1) There is no recent English translation to his knowledge; however, there are sections on this epic cycle in chapters 6 and 10 of his Turkic Oral Epic Poetry of 1992 (reprinted hb. and pb. Routledge, 2018). Chodzko’s translation, still giving a good idea of the epic cycle, is downloadable from the Internet Archive; 2) Monire Akbarpouran recently translated some episodes of an Azerbaijanian version of Köroghlu into French, in Koroğlu du XXIe siècle et les aşıq iraniens (Istanbul: es Éditions Isis, 2021); 3) there is a German translation by Karl Reichl of a branch of the Uzbek Köroghlu/Goroghli cycle, Rawšan. Ein usbekisches mündliches Epos (Asiatische Forschungen, 93. Wies­baden, 1985) [from January 2022 communication].

The works of Juan Benet

Juan Benet (1927–1993) worked as a civil engineer who managed to write twelve novels, five short-story collections and a dozen non-fiction works in his spare time. From early on, he developed a distinctive literary style that set him apart from the narrativism of contemporary Spanish authors. His style is said to be influenced by Faulkner's.

According to Wikipedia,

Recognized today as one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century, the Times on January 18, 1993, compared him with France's Marcel Proust, Ireland's James Joyce, and the U.S. writer Faulkner.

This is high praise for an author who is virtually unknown outside Spain.

According to Juan Herranz, his three best books are the following

• Volverás a Región (1967), his first novel, translated as Return to Región by Gregory Rabassa (Columbia University Press, 1985), and considered a break with the dominant realism of Spanish literature at the time;
• El aire de un crimen (1980, finalist for the Planeta Prize in 1980), which sold the most copies during his lifetime;
• Herrumbrosas lanzas (three volumes, 1983–1986).

Two other works that are popular on GoodReads and available in English are the following:

• The Construction of the Tower of Babel, a translation by Adrian Nathan West (Wakefield Press, 2017) of the essay La construcción de la torre de Babel (1990),
• A Meditation, a translation by Gregory Rabassa (Persea Books, 1982) of the novel Una meditación (1970).

Bealu Girma

This Ethiopian journalist and author (born 1939, disappeared 1984) was so outspoken in his critique of the Derg dictatorship that he is presumed to have been assassinated by government agents, although his disappearance has never been definitively solved.

His novel Oromay, is believed to have been linked to his disappearance. It portrays the Red Star Campaign of the Derg military junta, in such a way that it was banned by the government 24 hours after its publication. The first complete English translation was published in February 2025, and an excerpt can be read online in English from Words Without Borders.

Other works include Beyond the Horizon, The Bell of Conscience, The Call of the Red Star, and Haddis.

We have no amharic-language questions yet, despite the fact that this language has as many speakers as Italian and more than Ukrainian or Greek (three of this site's top seven languages).

Ghassan Kanafani

Following EJoshuaS's tradition of promoting the literature of persecuted peoples, surely it's time for a topic challenge on Palestinian literature. Kanafani is perhaps the most famous Palestinian writer and novelist, with many novels, novellas, and short stories to his name, including:

• Men in the Sun (1962), about three refugees from the Palestinian diaspora and their struggles to get from Iraq to Kuwait.
• All That's Left to You (1966), a prizewinning novel about a brother and sister in Gaza and their family relations.
• Umm Saad (1969), a novella about an eponymous character who is based on a real person and represents the struggle of Palestinian women.
• Returning to Haifa (1969), another story about a Palestinian family, which has been adapted for stage and screen in languages including Arabic, Hebrew, and English.
• The Hat and the Prophet (1973), a play influenced by existentialist philosophy.
• Short story collections including A Death in Bed No. 12, The Land of Sad Oranges, and Palestine's Children.

There's a variety of material here, ranging from short stories of a few pages up to novels. Some of it is freely available online, although I'm not sure about the legality. I'm guessing most of them will be tough reads, emotionally speaking, but worth it to understand the ordeals undergone by Palestinians, including displacement, imprisonment, and massacres, over a period of many decades. Kanafani himself was murdered by a car bomb, with some of his literary work appearing only posthumously.

Kanafani's obituary in Lebanon's The Daily Star wrote that: "He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

Sounds like a very interesting figure for a Literature SE topic challenge!

Bhisham Sahni

Bhisham Sahni (1915–2003) was and remains one of the most acclaimed Indian writers of the twentieth century. Sahni was fluent in several languages including English and Russian, but chose to write mainly in Hindi. His novels and short stories were widely read; his stage plays widely performed; his screenplays widely viewed. Sahni was born in Rawalpindi and educated in Lahore, both in present-day Pakistan. Upon the partition of the Indian subcontinent, his family migrated to India. The novel for which he is best known, Tamas (Darkness or Ignorance; 1974), is a stark depiction of the horrors attendant upon Partition, based on his recollections of the violence he had seen in Rawalpindi and elsewhere. Tamas was awarded India's highest literary honor, the Sahitya Akademi Award. Sahni also wrote the screenplay for a hugely successful television series (1987) based on the novel. The series, which made him a household name, can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube, all four parts spliced into a single video approximately five hours long.

Tamas has been translated into English three times, first by Jai Ratan (1988); then by Sahni himself (2001); and most recently by Daisy Rockwell (2025). Sahni's own favorite among his novels, however, was Mayyadas ki Maarhi (Mayyadas's Castle, 1987), which he translated into English himself as The Mansion (1988); another translation, which drops the definite article from the title, is by Shveta Sarda (2016). A couple of Sahni's short stories are in Crossing Over: Partition Literature from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, edited by Frank Stewart and Sukrita Paul Kumar, available on archive.org. Various other novels and short stories have also been translated into English, as has his play Madhavi (1982; tr. Alok Bhalla, 2002). Unfortunately, few of his works are available online, as they are still under copyright. However, they are well worth tracking down in print.

Sahni translated various works from Russian into Hindi, for example Tolstoy's Resurrection. He also edited an influential Hindi literary magazine, Nai Kahaniyaan (New Stories), from 1965 to 1967, and compiled several short story anthologies. His work as a translator and editor would be within scope for this topic challenge.

The poetry of Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger, 1887–1975) was born in Guadeloupe. His family moved to France in 1899 but the fauna and flora of the West Indies created a life-long interest in nature in him. His first collection of poems, Éloges (1911) reflected his nostalgia for Guadeloupe.

While in China as a diplomat (1916–1921), he wrote the epic poem Anabase, which T. S. Eliot later translated into English. He didn't publish any other books until his exile in the USA during the Régime de Vichy and the first 12 years after the end of World War II. During those years, he published several other collections: Exil (1945), Vents (1946) and Amers (1957).

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry, which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time". In 1972 Gallimard published his Œuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which is also a kind of consecration (especially for a living author).

Even though we currently have 242 questions about French literature, only eleven of those are about French poetry.

The works of Camara Laye

Camara Laye (1928–1980) was a writer from Guinea, which was still the Colony of French Guinea when he was born. His first novel, L'Enfant noir (1953, The African Child) was inspired by his own life and won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. Afrolivresque put the book on the first spot in its list of 21 classiques africains que vous devez avoir lus avant vos 21 ans, adding that it is a "true classic" and "one of the foundational texts of African literature in French".

His second book, Le Regard du roi (1954), is an allegorical novel in which a penniless white man goes on a kind of spiritual journey in Africa.

After an interruption of 12 years, Laye publishes Dramouss (A Dream of Africa). It is a kind of sequel to his first novel. The main character returns from France to Africa and has difficulty adapting again to life in Africa. He is also confronted with political violence.

His last work, Le Maître de la parole (1978), is a transcription and translation of the Epic of Sundiata as he had heard it in Maninka from the griot Babou Condé.

The works of Mulk Raj Anand

Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) was one of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction. He became widely known for his debut novel Untouchable (1935), which follows a single day in the life of Bakha, a toilet-cleaner and "untouchable". His second novel, Coolie (1936), was highly critical of British rule in India and India's caste system. His third novel, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), like his previous ones, also dealt with the topic of oppression of the poor.

Also worth mentioning is the trilogy consisting of The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1939) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). Mulk Raj Anand remained productive until well into his nineties. In addition to novels, he also published short stories, children's literature and non-fiction, including books on art.

The works of Bouamel Sansal

Bouamel Sansal (born 1949) is an Algerian author who writes in French. He began writing novels at the age of 50. According to Wikipedia, "The assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in 1992 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria inspired him to write about his country." However, since the publication of his essay Poste restante: Alger in 2006, his books have been banned in Algeria.

In 2011, Sansal was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade,

to honor an Algerian author and passionate story-teller who has consistently encouraged intercultural dialogue in a spirited and compassionate manner as well as in an atmosphere of respect and mutual understanding.

The following novels by Sansal have been translated into English:

• An Unfinished Business / The German Mujahid (French: Le village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller, 208). Translated by Frank Wynne. Europa Editions, 2009.
  • Literary prizes: Grand prix RTL-Lire 2008, Grand prix de la francophonie (Académie française), Prix Nessim Habif (Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique).
• 2084: The End of the World (French: 2084: La fin du monde, 2015). Translated by Alison Anderson. Europa Editions, 2017.
  • Literary prize: Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.
• Harraga (French: Harraga, 2005). Translated by Frank Wynne. Bloomsbury, 2014.