Divided Publishing

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) was a French pediatrician and psychoanalyst.

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, black studies and feminist philosophy. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC 'Affective Societies' at Free University, Berlin. Together with Philipp Wüschner, she hosts a monthly conversations on 'Feelings at the end of the world' at Volksbühne Berlin. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturge or writer, sometimes as a performer. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book.

Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovene writer and editor. She writes for several Slovene media outlets and is a monthly columnist for The Guardian. Her collection of short stories Untied (Razvezani, Beletrina, 2017) was met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovene Book Fair, followed by two further nominations and the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the short story collection is translated to German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020), that was well received by readers at home and abroad – she toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, including the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovene Kresnik Award. Her fourth novel is September (Beletrina, 2024).

Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, and Vlado Žabot. Five of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš, and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for Best Scholarly Translation, and The Long Coming of the Fire, a volume of poems by the modernist Macedonian poet Aco Šopov, which he co-translated with Christina E. Kramer. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.