The University of Guadalajara, through a project created by the Environmental Sciences Museum as part of the University’s Cultural Center, and with the support of the Guadalajara International Book Fair, has established the José Emilio Pacheco City and Nature Award. The prize, which will be given for the first time this year, will be dedicated to poetry. The winning author, who must write in Spanish and have at least ten unpublished poems or poems published in the last five years that are related to nature, urban sustainability, socio-ecological harmony and environmental conservation, will be given a purse of US $10,000. The award is dedicated to poet José Emilio Pacheco, whose work explores the duality between cities and nature.
Created by the University of Guadalajara, and with the collaboration of the National Institute for Indigenous Languages, the Culture Ministry, the National Commission for the Development of the Indigenous Cultures and Jalisco’s Department of Education, the American Indigenous Literature Award is granted to enrich, protect and promote the legacy and richness of Mexico’s indigenous peoples through literature in all its forms, and to and acknowledge and further develop the careers and works of indigenous authors. The award, which carries a purse of US $25,000, will be given for the fourth time at the 2016 FIL Guadalajara.
The SM Ibero-American Award for Literature for Children and Young People was implemented in 2005, the year of Ibero-American literature, with the goal of promoting literature for children and young people throughout Ibero-America. The award is given out each year during the Guadalajara International Book Fair to recognize writers of literature for children and young people and carries a purse of US $30,000.
Juan Carlos Quezadas
Karime Cardona Cury
With the goal of creating a network that helps to encourage the work of illustrators of books for children and young people in Ibero-America, the SM Foundation and the FIL Guadalajara invites illustrators to submit their work to be included in the Annual Ibero-American Illustration Catalog. The 45 works selected will be displayed in an exposition at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In addition, illustrators will have the opportunity to work on an illustrated book with Ediciones SM and the winner will be given US $5,000. You can find more information at: www.iberoamericailustra.com
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An Assyrian on the streets of Paris. Biography of literary creation
FIL Literature
An Assyrian on the streets of Paris. Biography of literary creation
Samuel Shimon dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, but fate chose a different direction for him. Born into an Assyrian Christian family, he never thought that his Jewish name would bring him so many problems. He was imprisoned in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Later, he became a fighter in the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut.
In 1985, he arrived in Paris as a refugee and lived on the streets for many years, an extraordinary experience that changed his life. In 1996 he moved to London, where he and his wife, Margaret Obank, founded the magazine Banipal to translate modern Arabic literature into English. For 25 years, this magazine has managed to put Arabic literature on the international map. In 2005, he published his autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris, which has been widely circulated in the Arab world, and has been translated into several languages. Samuel tells us about his life, his book and the Arabic literary scene today.
Participant: Samuel Shimon
Presenter: Shadi Rohana
Samuel Shimon
(Iraq, 1956)
He was born into a poor Assyrian family in the Iraqi city of Habbaniyah. Since he left his country in December 1978 he has lived in Amman, Beirut, Cyprus, Cairo, Yemen and Tunisia, until he was granted the right of asylum in France in 1985.
Shimon started writing short stories and poetry in the late seventies, publishing the short stories in Jordanian newspapers and the poems in the magazine Al-Karmel by Mahmoud Darwish. While in Paris he published his first poetry collection in Arabic Old Boy (1987) and founded the Gilgamesh publishing house in which eleven books by Arab authors appeared.
In 1996 he moved to London, where he met the English researcher Margaret Obank and, together in 1998, they published the journal Banipal which had the aim of translating Arabic literature into English; they also created the Banipal Foundation to promote Arabic literature on a global scale and annually award the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for the best translation from Arabic to English.
His autobiographical novel Iraqi fi Baris (An Iraqi in Paris) was published in 2005 by Al-Kamel in Beirut, Lebanon and was very well received. It was reprinted in Egypt, Morocco and Algeria. It has been translated into French, English, Swedish, Kurdish and Hebrew. Boyd Tonkin described it in The Independent as "An Arabic response to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer".
In 2001, in collaboration with Margaret Obank, Shimon published in English the Anthology of Arabic poetry, and in 2010, with Bloomsbury House in New York and London, edited and published the anthology Beirut 39, which includes the work of 39 promising young people from the Arab world. In 2007, Samuel was selected by the British Booker Prize to be the first chairman of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the Arab Booker. In 2013, Samuel launched a new cultural magazine called Kikah Magazine for World Literature and published a selection of fourteen short stories by Iraqi writers entitled Baghdad Noir at Akashic House in New York (2018). The book had a Spanish edition of Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2023.
The Spanish version of the magazine Banipal saw the light in the summer of 2020. In a review of the famous German newspaper Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung Samuel Shimon, the editor-in-chief of Banipal, is described as "a tireless promoter in the dissemination of Arabic literature". He is currently working on her second novel Underwear Under War, based on her experience in the ranks of the Palestinian resistance in Beirut during the years of the Lebanese civil war.
Shadi Rohana
(Palestine, 1985)
Born in Haifa, Rohana is an academic and literary translator based in México City, translating between Arabic, Spanish and English.
He has introduced and translated a number of Latin American authors from Spanish to Arabic, as well as speeches and declarations from the EZLN in Chiapas. The Arabic translation of José Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto (Palestine, 2016) was his first novel-length work.
He graduated in Latin American Studies from Swarthmore College, USA, and has an MA from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is currently a full-time faculty member at the Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México, where he teaches Arabic language and literature.
Other activities involving the participant:
Poetry Room
Non-Hegemonic Languages in Mexico: Challenges, Possibilities, and Translation Experiences
Organiza: Banipal Magazine and FIL Guadalajara