The Penguin's Song

Hassan Daoud was born in the village of Noumairieh in southern Lebanon in 1950 and moved as a child to Beirut, though like so many Lebanese families, his retained strong links to the village and returned there every summer. Daoud studied Arabic literature at university and worked as a reporter throughout Lebanon's civil war. He is the editor of the 'Nawafidh' cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Mustaqbal and the author of two volumes of short stories and eight novels, four of which have already appeared in English translation. He is widely respected throughout the Arab world, and his work 180 Sunsets was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize.Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also Joint Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). Her recent and forthcoming scholarly books are (as editor) Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010) and Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Women's History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). She has translated over a dozen works of Arabic fiction and memoir, including Elias Khoury's As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2011). In addition to having won prizes for her translation she has been a judge for the University of Arkansas Press Arabic Translation Prize and the Saif al-Ghobashi-Banipal Prize. She considers herself a 'translation activist', mentoring and training emerging literary translators, organising internships for them (through CASAW) and participating in studies and events on literary translation from and into Arabic.