Divided Publishing

I have brought you a severed hand

£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia
£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia

I have brought you a severed handGhayath Almadhountrans. Catherine Cobham

£ 11.99

I have brought you a severed hand

Ghayath Almadhoun

trans. Catherine Cobham

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

  • 978-1-7398431-2-0
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 144 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 24 March 2025

About the author

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.

Photo: Sina Opalka

About the translator

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).

Endorsements (3)

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation.

Don Mee Choi

Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable.

Alfred Schaffer

Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun.

Kaveh Akbar

Press (4)

Book of the Week: Ghayath Almadhoun, I have brought you a severed handPalFestPalestine Festival of Literature24/07/2025
Ghayath Almadhoun: Europe, we love your art and hate your bombsDritan KiçiThe Brussels Review24/05/2025
On Ghayath Almadhoun’s ‘I have brought you a severed hand’Toby ÜpsonThe Yellow Paper07/05/2025
Ghayath Almadhoun: Writing is my real homelandDimitra DidangelouThe Brussels Review10/10/2024

Upcoming (3)

08 November Melbourne Ghayath Almadhoun in conversation with Azza Zein at Collingwood House, hosted by Un Projects
06 November Melbourne Ghayath Almadhoun interviewed by Ender Başkan at Readings, Carlton
29 October Ubud, Bali Ghayath Almadhoun at Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

Flood Tide

£ 11.99
Pre order in rile* books
£ 11.99
Pre order in rile* books

Flood TideAna Schnabltrans. Rawley Grau

£ 11.99

Flood Tide

Ana Schnabl

trans. Rawley Grau

A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.

Boštjan Videmšek

Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.

Chris Kraus

In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.

  • 978-1-7395161-5-4
  • 21.6 x 13.9  cm
  • 232 pp.
  • Paperback
  • October 2025

About the author

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). 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, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Photo: Luka Dakskobler

About the translator

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, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six 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, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.

Endorsements (7)

If you can imagine a story that’s an unsettling mix of psychological meltdown and detective story, featuring a stoned novelist wracked with back pain, going back to her hometown in Slovenia to masquerade as a Philip Marlowe wannabe to finally find out why her older brother died, and uncovering secrets about her friends and herself she probably would rather not have known, congratulations: you’ve just imagined Ana Schnabl’s brilliant Flood Tide. Readers, come for the moments of revelation, stay for the sight of a writer unravelling her characters until they’re left raw, and you’re left hooked.

Rishi Dastidar

Ana Schnabl’s new novel openly defies conventional literary genres: Are we reading a family drama, a troubled homecoming story or a marijuana-infused psychological novel? In a sleepy seaside town in contemporary Slovenia, nothing is what it seems, and no one is what they purport to be … An exciting, brilliantly written book, in which the reader shall not resist stepping into the detective’s shoes.

Nicoletta Asciuto

A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.

Alice Blackhurst

Schnabl’s prose is matter of fact and yet somehow thrilling. She writes with absolute clarity. Stunning.

Molly Aitken

A fizzing fox in the hen-house of cosy British crime novels. Move over Richard Osman.

Tiffany Anne Tondut

A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and at once disconnecting the banal with the strangeness of grief.

Rose Cleary

We enter the story as if eavesdropping on real people – something the heroine herself confirms when she says the tale would not unfold as a psychological, sociological or crime novel, but as life itself.

Nada Breznik, RTV SLO