Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature

Celebrating the first ten years of the Writers in Translation Programme

Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from across the globe. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, English PEN and Pushkin Press present Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature - ten new essays by leading international writers, with an introduction by award-winning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri.

These illuminating, invigorating pieces reflect on the question of identity, both personal and political, in a many-frontiered world. Alain Mabanckou writes on how the Congo remains his umbilical cord, Andrés Neuman on growing up in Argentina, Chan Koonchung on the impossibility of defining China, Israel's Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on a meta-fictional encounter between writer and translator, Samar Yazbek on post-revolutionary Syria, Asmaa al-Ghul on how every experience in Palestine is linked to occupation, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi on the defiance of literature in the face of Iran's revolution, Hanna Krall on the lasting effects of the Holocaust in Poland, Andrey Kurkov on the dead and living languages of the Caucasus, and Turkey's Elif Shafak on the necessity of a cosmopolitan and diverse Europe.