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Articles by Emma Ramadan
For the Reader, It’s a Feast: A Review of Notes to a Black Woman by Françoise Ega
Notes to a Black Woman by Françoise Ega, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Yale University Press, 2026 On the final night of Françoise Ega’s hard-earned summer vacation—to Paris from her home in sun-drenched Marseille, with five restless children in tow—her friend Solange tries to persuade her to put down the pen and open a restaurant.
‘Fill It with Reality’ | Françoise Ega, Emma Ramadan
In 1962 Françoise Ega, a Martinican woman working odd jobs and raising five children in Marseille, stumbled upon a newspaper article about Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian woman who, “hunched over” in a favela and using “pieces of paper that [she] found in the trash,” wrote a highly acclaimed memoir, Quarto de despejo, that would go on to be an enormous bestseller.
Dichotomies of Love: A Review of Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa
Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the Arabic by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories Press, 2025 Nearly halfway through Living in Your Light, the narrator, Malika, plainly states: “Survival doesn’t make us into better people.” Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel tells the story of this survival in three parts, ranging from 1954 to 1999, showing us the endurance of his protagonist through rejection, death, love, and loss—but also her gradual hardening.
‘My Great Arab Melancholy’: A Talk with Lamia Ziadé and Emma Ramadan
Interviews Bye Bye Babylon, Emma Ramadan, Lamia Ziadé, My Great Arab Melancholy, My Port of Beirut By Tugrul Mende My Great Arab Melancholy, written by Lamia Ziadé, was recently published in Emma Ramadan’s English translation by Pluto Press. In this conversation, they talk about the process of working together, what drew them both to this style of narration, and the uniqueness of Ziadé’s oeuvre. How did you two meet and started working together?
Emma Roberts & Joan Didion Is The Book Club Crossover We've Been Waiting For
Finding a community of people who love reading books as much as you do is top tier — especially when you gather to talk about your favorite book club finds. Since we're having a hard time choosing our favorite celebrity book club at Brit + Co, we're introducing you to another one filled with all the cool girl reads. That's right — the Belletrist book club by besties Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss is the next thing that should be on your literary list.
“The Lover” @40: A Roundtable
This year I read, again, Marguerite Duras’s cult 1984 novel The Lover, first published in France 40 years ago this autumn, on a train from Paris to the South of France. The winter break, or vacances d’hiver, had just started and my carriage overflowed with surly adolescents eating pungent snacks and broadcasting loud content from their phones. This environment threw me a sharp prompt: what, age 35, was I doing still returning to a work I first read as a teenager?
Podcast Transcription: Jennifer Croft — The Magic Word
This episode, we're celebrating women in translation month with translator + debut novelist Jennifer Croft, whose book The Extinction of Irena Rey came out this past March! – Amali Amali Okay, today in honor of Women in Translation Month, I am joined by Jennifer Croft, long time translator of Olga Tokarczuk, with whom she won the International Booker Prize for the novel Flights. Jennifer Definitely.
Where to Eat, Stay, and Shop in Marseille
Marseille: It’s east and it’s west, a city with awe-inspiring force shrouded in mystery. It’s hard to pin down. It must be teased out, won over through discovery. And then suddenly, it’s yours! When you arrive in Marseille from the airport highway, the tracking shot is spectacular. The sea. The islands in the distance. The buildings straight ahead. And the long footbridge crossing that’s like an artery into the city. Marseille feels cinematic. The air is sweet even when the cold mistral wind is blowing.
Forever Elsewhere | Scholastique Mukasonga
At the beginning was the Garden. Call it what you like: Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, Childhood—“Other than childhood, what was there in those days that no longer is?” wrote the Poet.1 The Garden was inhabited only by a young couple, a forever young couple (but these days the word certainly calls for precision: a couple, yes, I mean: a man, a woman). They were named Adam and Eve, him, Adam, her, Eve. The Garden had been grown for them alone, a bespoke Garden.
Book review: Maud Ventura’s debut novel My Husband addresses female hysteria and domestic unrest
My Husband By Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan Thriller/HarperVia/Hardcover/272 pages/$28.99/Amazon SG (amzn.to/442QSP6) 4 stars Maud Ventura’s 2021 debut novel My Husband begins with a statement that is often a harbinger of trouble in paradise: “We need to find a moment to talk.” Those dreaded words from her husband send the unnamed narrator, a 40-year-old Frenchwoman who works part-time as an English teacher and English-French translator, into a spiral.
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, July 14, 2023
Does a commitment to doing good deeds entitle a person to some ethical leeway? The question is teased in Hope, Andrew Ridker's loving and hilarious satire of liberal pieties, starring the Greenspans of Brookline, Mass., who--despite seeming to have it all--make choices that risk it all for that elusive American-branded commodity: happiness. Scott Greenspan has a successful cardiology practice.
Exiles | Scholastique Mukasonga
When I was three I experienced exile for the first time. It was 1959: the year the first pogroms broke out against the Tutsi, which would culminate, after many massacres, in the genocide of 1994. If I close my eyes, I see those images flit by like a time-lapse movie. I’m in a field. I’m scampering behind my mother, who’s bent over her hoe. Suddenly, there’s this rumble, this hum coming from the hills. Smoke rises from the dense swell of the banana plantations. My mother grabs me.
Review: 'My Husband,' by Maud Ventura, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
"My Husband" is a short French novel about obsession, mind games and gaslighting masquerading as love. It unfolds over the course of a week, one chapter per day, narrated by an unnamed 40-year-old married woman with two children. The narrator works as a teacher and translator, but it is her husband's behavior that she spends most of her time trying to interpret.
Toril Moi · Don’t look back: Rereading Duras · LRB 13 April 2023
From the 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework. I now realise that I was treating the text as an intellectual puzzle rather than as an expression of lived experience.
What Successful Memoirs Accomplish
Annie Ernaux, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, similarly uses intimate events from her life as tools in a larger project, Nellie Hermann writes.The Ernaux books that are usually called “memoirs,” such as Happening, about the abortion she had when she was a young woman, and A Girl’s Story, an account of her first sexual encounter, are also experiments in the sufficiency of language to capture experience.
Book World: A new look at Marguerite Duras, who, at 70, shocked the literary world
- - - At age 70, Marguerite Duras published, to much acclaim, "The Lover," an autobiographical novel about her sexual awakening at age 15 in Saigon, with an older, wealthy man. She had alluded to this deflowering in others of her many novels, but this one got the most attention, winning her the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and turning her into something of a literary icon.
Emma Ramadan & Olivia Baes at The Rockwell Place
Live at The Rockwell Place! Tuesday, December 6, 7:00PM ET Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes present Marguerite Duras' The Easy Life In conversation with Stephanie LaCava Literary icon Marguerite Duras’ foundational masterpiece The Easy Life: a Novel has been translated for the first time in Englishby both Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes. It is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by.
Notes from the Horn Book
The Getaway by Lamar Giles Jay has lived for three years in Karloff Country, a Disney World–like resort in Virginia whose guests include the world’s super-wealthy... What We Saw by Mary Downing Hahn “Pool. Mall. Library.” The summer after seventh grade was getting boring until Skylar persuades Abbi to do something different... Murder for the Modern Girl by Kendall Kulper There’s an “angel killer” stalking the streets in this flapper-era dark fantasy set in late-1920s Chicago...
Washington Independent Review of Books
Readers like a good story, don’t we? Isn’t that why we pick up a book, turn the pages, dig in? Sometimes, the best stories are those we learn of the writers themselves. Think John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole’s mother worked to place his manuscript after he committed suicide, sending it to publisher after publisher in search of a home. Consider Ernest Hemingway and his war injuries, his cold and drunken life in Paris, his standing desks, six-toed cats, and multiple wives.
A Look Ahead: 10/9/22
Sign up for weekly emails A peek at what’s on tap in the Independent this week. Monday: A review of Panics by Barbara Molinard; translated by Emma Ramadan. Tuesday: An interview with Eugene L. Meyer, author of Hidden Maryland: In Search of America in Miniature. Wednesday: Podcast: David Maraniss, author of Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Thursday: October’s “Bedtime Stories,” featuring Rafael Alvarez, author of Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery.
New Literature in Translation: September 2022 by Powell's Staff
This month, we’re so excited to feature seven recently released titles in translation.
Washington Independent Review of Books
On the eve of her gender-affirmation surgery, an Algerian woman named Aziz welcomes her friend Zahira into her apartment. The women are colleagues — immigrant sex workers who live in Paris — and Zahira has come to assist her friend in selecting a new name in advance of the following day’s procedure. “You have to pick me out a first name like yours,” Aziz insists. “With a Z. And an h. And an a.” They consider Zahra, ZouZou, Zhira, Zohra, and Zineb.
Fall 2021 Literature in Translation Preview
September 21, 2021 By Cristina Rodriguez & Emma Ramadan We asked Cristina Rodriguez and Emma Ramadan, the reading minds behind the Trove newsletter, what works in translation they’re looking forward to this Fall. Surprises and great picks abound. Dig in, and be sure to subscribe to Trove via the link below.
Zabor, or the Crisis of Language
Zabor, or the Crisis of Language by Emma Ramadan Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms is about a young man named Ishmael, self-dubbed Zabor, who believes he has a gift that doubles as a mission: if he writes about the inhabitants of his Algerian village in his newly mastered French, he can prolong their lives. If he doesn’t write about them within a few days of crossing their path, they will die. Simple as that.
Love is Strange: A Reading List for an Uncommon Valentine’s Day
Whether you’re ensconced with a partner, happily single, unhappily single, or one of the many shades in between, the arrival of February and its associated holidays conjure up images of partnership and passion. Valentine’s Day sometimes brings with it a sense of despair that loneliness is forever, or anxiety that your relationship isn’t what it’s “supposed” to look like. Inevitably, there will be countless articles hocking advice on how to find your soulmate.
Book review: 'The Lost Manuscript' celebrates the power of books
The Lost Manuscript BY JAY STRAFFORD FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR On a short trip to Brittany in 2016, Parisian Anne–Lise Briard finds the manuscript of a novel in a hotel nightstand. Intrigued, she reads it, loves it and mails it to the address she finds on a card within it. To her surprise, she receives a letter from Sylvestre Fahmer, who tells her he lost the then-unfinished manuscript on a trip from France to Canada in 1983. To her amazement, he reveals that he did not write the second half.
Washington Independent Review of Books
This loosely constructed, vivid immigrant tale will both challenge and reward persevering readers. On the eve of her gender-affirmation surgery, an Algerian woman named Aziz welcomes her friend Zahira into her apartment. The women are colleagues — immigrant sex workers who live in Paris — and Zahira has come to assist her friend in selecting a new name in advance of the following day’s procedure. “You have to pick me out a first name like yours,” Aziz insists. “With a Z. And an h.
Recent Reads: Flash Book Reviews from The Argus Arts & Culture Team
Now that the semester is in full swing, it can be hard to find time to read for fun. But in a pandemic that limits our travel to unfamiliar places and contact with strangers, books can provide some rare adventure and a much-needed reprieve from the blue light of our communication devices. If you’re mourning chaotic college nights, or if you’re just craving excitement and novelty in general, consider curling up with one of these new releases.
Apart
Sep 25, 2020 25 Min read time “I see it all. What you did, Papa. I’m not angry at you. Don’t worry.” A Moroccan woman living in exile in Paris remembers her father’s dying days. Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Abdellah Taïa’s new novel A Country for Dying (trans. Emma Ramadan), printed with permission of Seven Stories Press. He died young. Fifty-six years old, that’s young. Right? My mother doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. What happened in the past is in the past.
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
A Novel by Meryem Alaoui Translated by Emma Ramadan This hilarious, colorful portrait of a sex worker navigating life in modern Morocco introduces a promising new literary voice. Thirty-four-year-old prostitute Jmiaa reflects on the bustling world around her with a brutal honesty, but also a quick wit that cuts through the drudgery.
“The Boy” by Marcus Malte [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere.
Literary translator Emma Ramadan on identity, cultural history, and the power of language
Did you grow up in a multilingual household? My mom’s mother tongue is English. She’s British. But she also speaks French fluently, and apparently speaks German, though I’ve never heard her speak it. My father’s first language was Arabic, then French, then English. They only spoke to my brother and me in English. My dad’s whole family was in Southern California with us.
“Me & Other Writing” Shows Marguerite Duras’ Recurring Exploration of Lifelong Obsessions
from the October 2019 issue Reviewed by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue Translated from the French by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan Dorothy, 2019 Spanning thirty years, the essays selected and translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes range from meditations on reading and writing to personal pieces bordering on autofiction.
March 2016 - Words Without Borders
March 2016 Image: Hicham Benohoud, Untitled, Oil on Canvas, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie D’Art L’Atelier 21 This month, Words without Borders features writing from Morocco. The work in these pages—translated from French, classical and Moroccan Arabic, and Tamazight—explores questions of privilege, sexism, repression, and the tension between tradition and modernity to reveal the richness of this underrepresented literary culture.
Delphine Minoui - I'm Writing You From Tehran: A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Past and Their Country's Future, in partnership with the French Embassy | Politics and Prose Bookstore
Minoui, an award-winning Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro, was born in France to a French mother and an Iranian father. When her grandfather died in 1998, she decided to visit Iran in his memory. She stayed for ten years. In this moving and insightful book, framed as a letter to her grandfather, she recounts her experience over the course of that decade. It was time of great changes, both for her and for the country.
Five Translators on the Joys and Challenges of Translating Children’s Books
By Emma Ramadan Ginny Tapley Takemori, Lawrence Schimel, Denise Muir, Laura Watkinson, and Daniel Hahn Emma Ramadan, whose recent translations include Who Left the Light On? and The Boy (co-translated with Tom Roberge), spoke with five top translators—of Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch—about their experiences bringing children’s books from around the world into English.
Five Translators on the Joys and Challenges of Translating Children’s Books
By Emma Ramadan Ginny Tapley Takemori, Lawrence Schimel, Denise Muir, Laura Watkinson, and Daniel Hahn Emma Ramadan spoke with five top translators—of Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch—about their experiences bringing children’s books from around the world into English. In recent years, more and more children’s imprints have cropped up within US publishers of translated literature.
A Translator’s Diary: A Year in the Life of Emma Ramadan Part IV
Essay by Emma Ramadan — Published on December 17, 2018 Published in Issue 54 I’ve been dancing around this final diary because I’ve been trying to take myself out of it. But translation doesn’t just happen. It’s a ball getting tossed from person to person, it’s breathed on, dropped, stabbed, reinflated, pushed aside, rubbed in the sand. Why shouldn’t we know about the translators who put words on the pages of the books we love? I started this translator diary almost a year ago.
WHO LEFT THE LIGHT ON?
“This is my town, / simple and typical. / Each house has a door, / two windows, a red roof / —all so predictable.” The unseen inhabitants follow suit: “At sundown, the neighbors close their shutters—goodnight! / At daybreak, they open them—oh so polite.” The identical houses, created in what appears to be digital collage and arranged in a geometric grid, give the initial pages a quiltlike appearance, the compositions flat but appealing.
Restoring Morocco’s Past
In 1967 the Moroccan writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani contracted tuberculosis and was confined for six months in the Moulay Youssef Hospital in Rabat. In 1990 he published a novel, The Hospital. In the first lines, its unnamed narrator tells us, “When I walked through the iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive.
A Translator’s Diary: A Year in the Life of Emma Ramadan Part III
What is it like to live day-to-day as a translator? What are the worries and the stresses, the pleasures and the reliefs? How does a translator get by, and where do her projects fit into the rest of her life? In this new year-long feature, translator Emma Ramdan gives us some answers by keeping an open diary about a year her life. In June I got married. I wrote my wedding vows between selling books to customers at Riffraff, and then at the end of July we were off on our honeymoon.
Issue 53 of The Quarterly Conversation
When I first read Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile for my high school AP French class, an alarm went off on me. That I was reading the words of someone who understood love in the same way I did. At that point in my life I hadn’t yet experienced love, but it didn’t matter. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come, of what I already knew to be true. The next year, in a college French class, I read Duras’s The Lover. From the first page (J’ai un visage détruit) I saw myself again.
Women Talking - Miriam Toews;
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks-waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why-their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.' Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.
50 Must-Read Books by Women in Translation
August is Women in Translation Month! To celebrate I’ve collected 50 must-read books by women in translation from all over the world. I’ve limited it to fiction and short stories, but there are hundreds of fascinating works of nonfiction and poetry collections by women writers in translation.
Literary Interventions: Women Translators on Women Writers They Dream of Translating
Celebrate Women in Translation month by reading the work of under-translated women writers. First established in 2014 by Meytal Radzinski, Women in Translation month is a young initiative, but one that addresses years and years of disparity between the number of published translations of women and male writers. Taking place throughout the month of August, the goals of Women in Translation month are simple: to increase discussion about women writers in translation and to read more of their work.
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur - Violette Leduc;
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A Translator’s Diary: A Year in the Life of Emma Ramadan Part II
What is it like to live day-to-day as a translator? What are the worries and the stresses, the pleasures and the reliefs? How does a translator get by, and where do her projects fit into the rest of her life? In this new year-long feature, translator Emma Ramdan gives us some answers by keeping an open diary about a year her life.
A Translator’s Diary: A Year in the Life of Emma Ramadan
What is it like to live day-to-day as a translator? What are the worries and the stresses, the pleasures and the reliefs? How does a translator get by, and where do her projects fit into the rest of her life? In this new year-long feature, translator Emma Ramdan gives us some answers by keeping an open diary about a year her life. I ring in the New Year with a rare feeling: relief. At the end of December I finally receive some long-awaited paychecks and finish off 2017 with money in the bank.
Friday Finds: Words Without Borders Collects Writing by Tunisian Women
This month’s Words Without Borders has a special feature on contemporary writings by Tunisian, edited by author and translator Cécile Oumhani: What do Tunisian women write today? It is now almost seven years since the people of Tunisia put an end to dictatorship. And it is over sixty years since Tunisian women obtained a status women in neighboring countries are still dreaming of.
State of Emergency - Jeremy Tiang;
All delivery times quoted are the average, and cannot be guaranteed. These should be added to the availability message time, to determine when the goods will arrive. During checkout we will give you a cumulative estimated date for delivery. If you are not completely satisfied with your purchase*, you may return it to us in its original condition with in 30 days of receiving your delivery or collection notification email for a refund.
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