Sharjah Book Fair
The Sharjah International Book fair is one of the largest book fairs in the world,
and preceding it each year the organizer arrange what they call Matchmaking
sessions, to bring together publishers and agents from different countries to buy
and sell rights in books which might otherwise pass unnoticed by the largely
Anglophone publishers who rarely read books in any other language. It’s a bit
like what I imagine speed dating to be, but with a wider range of nationalities,
ages, genders and interests. I was there to try to sell rights in a few Skyscraper
books, but also to look out for possible books to translate from their writer’s
language to English. Thanks to the generosity of the Sharjah organisers, there
were translation grants available to help defray the costs of translation of books
that visiting publishers might like to acquire.
With a list that contains Middle Eastern content but written in English, we were
keen to find possible translation deals, and managed to get initial offers to
translate Britain in Palestine into Arabic, as well as – surprisingly – Is There
Anybody There?, our collection of essays on assisted suicide, which attracted the
attention of an Egyptian publisher. But the biggest surprise was the large
number of books which, at least on paper or by the descriptions of agents and
publishers, sound as if they deserved translating and publishing in the UK and
the US. At this stage I was just expressing interest, but there were intriguing
novels from Turkey, Holland and Italy, as well as a riveting-sounding true crime
book from Finland, and a political prisoner’s harrowing tale of life in an Egyptian
prison. Of course, with all of these it is good writing we are looking for, and with
a book written in another language this depends at least as much on the
translator’s ability to write as it does on the original author.
Publishing being the risky business it is, I hesitated to rush into doing deals for
every book I liked the sound of. But I’ve a hunch that the Skyscraper list for 2017
will contain a few translations which started life in Sharjah in autumn 2015.
