This event will be held in English.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. With the support of The Markaz Review (TMR).
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Authors Aliyeh Ataei and Salar Abdoh explore themes of translation, identity, and borders. Ataei, author of La frontière des oubliés, delves into the echoes of exile and the invisible wounds of war, writing in her native language. Abdoh, frequent translator of her work, writes in English as he explores finding one's place in a combustive Iran in A Nearby Country Called Love. They will navigate the complexities of language, history, and personal narrative in a conversation moderated by Laura Brimo, a Paris-based editor and translator.
La frontière des oubliés by Aliyeh Ataei (Gallimard, 2023)
Nine stories make up "The Frontier of the Forgotten" and trace the journey of the writer from her childhood escape from the Afghan border to building a life in Tehran. In each of these life vignettes that echo one another, she paints the portrait of her fellow exiles, the "border people," often women, all bearing traces of war, deep wounds marked by invisible bullets. With each encounter, she reflects on violence, exile, and identity. With her clear and incisive style, Aliyeh Ataei reveals truths that shake and stir.
A Nearby Country Called Love by Salar Abdoh (Viking Penguin, 2023)
A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which a man struggles to find his place in an Iran on the brink of combusting. Vibrant and evocative, intimate and intelligent, A Nearby Country Called Love is both a captivating window into contemporary Iran and a portrait of the parallel fates of a man and his country—a man who acknowledges the sullen and rumbling baggage of history but then chooses to step past its violent inheritance.
- The book will be available for purchase after the event, courtesy of The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore.
Speakers
Aliyeh Ataei is an Afghan-Iranian author and screenwriter whose books have won major literary awards in Iran, including Mehregan-e-Adab for Best Novel. She was born in 1981 in Iran, and grew up in Darmian, a border region situated between the South Khorasan Province in Iran and the Farah province in Afghanistan. In addition to publishing books, Ataei has worked for several magazines such as Hamshahri, Tajrobeh, and Nadastan. Her short stories and essays have been translated and published in numerous American and French magazines, including Guernica, Words without Borders, Michigan Quarterly Review, Adi Magazine, and Kenyon Review. Her collection of personal essays, titled Kursorkhi in Persian, was published by Gallimard in April 2023 as La frontière des oubliés. Widely recognized as a strong adherent of women’s rights, Ataei is deeply influenced by personal accounts of growing up as a female minority in Iran, and her work takes on themes such as identity and the émigré life. She is the 2023-24 artist-in-residence of the Displaced Artist Initiatives co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Learn more.
Salar Abdoh is an author and writer. His latest novel is A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking Penguin, 2023). His book, Out of Mesopotamia (Akashic, 2020), has been hailed as “One of a handful of great modern war novels,” and was a NYTimes Editors’ Choice, and also selected as a Best Book of the year across several platforms, including Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of Tehran At Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir. Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world. A professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, he conducts workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing. Learn more.
Moderator
Laura Brimo is a translator, an editor and a bookseller. After living in New York and collaborating with the Book Office of the French Embassy, she has worked as an editor for various publishing houses in France, including Gallimard, Gallmeister, and Les éditions du Sous-Sol. She has also been part of a co-owned bookstore in Paris for the past years, and continues translating novels, short-stories and essays under various pen names.
Organizers
The Displaced Artist Initiatives are designed to support artists who have had to leave their countries of origin due to extreme circumstances (war, natural disaster, political oppression). Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Columbia Global Centers | Paris addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science.
Each year the Institute for Ideas and Imagination brings together a cohort of 14-15 Fellows, half of them Columbia faculty and post-docs, the other half artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. The Institute fosters intellectual and creative diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia.
Sponsors
The Markaz Review (TMR) is a literary arts publication, edited by a diverse team of Arab and Iranian writers and translators, situated in Amman, Beirut, Berlin, London, Montpellier and the US. TMR publishes essays, short stories, poetry and art every Monday, along with 10 monthly issues per year, and produces the podcast Radio Tabbouli.
The Markaz Review is currently accepting submissions. Deadline March 15, more information here.
Venue
Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.
The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.
