CBCP x OIW webinar: Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation, 23 April

The webinar series ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.

23rd April 2026, 5pm-6.30pm UK time. Online only. To join via MS Teams, please register here.

Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation: in conversation with translators, advocates and scholars of Arabic-language writing for young audiences, Sawad Hussain, Susanne Abou Ghaida and Marcia Lynx Qualey. Despite a huge, diverse base of speakers and vibrant publishing industries, relatively little Arabic-language literature is available in translation to readers of English. This is particularly true of books for children and young adults.

Drawing on many collective years of experience in the field, our speakers will talk about what kind of Arabic-language YA is getting translated into English, who is translating and publishing these works, and what might be behind some of these trends. They will offer us a window into the scouting and pitching processes, discussing the specific challenges and opportunities that they face in translating children’s books from Arabic to English. We will learn about advocacy initiatives such as ArabKidLitNow! and the Bila Hudood digital literary festival, hear about what titles they have translated recently, and what they are hoping to translate next.

Speakers:

Sawad Hussain is a PEN Award-winning translator from Arabic. She has been shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the National Book Award for Translation, and longlisted for the Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing, among others. A former co-chair of the Translators’ Association in the UK, Sawad has also served as a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. In 2024, she became the first translator-in-residence for Wasafiri, and was the Spring 2025 translator-in-residence at PIIRS, Princeton University.

Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly, for which she won an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. Her personal focus is on translated literature for young readers, including YA, middle grade, and chapter books. Her most recent is a co-translation — with Sawad Hussain — of Maria Daadouch’s I Want Golden Eyes.

Susanne Abou Ghaida is a researcher specialised in Arabic children’s and adolescent literature. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her doctoral research was on the contemporary Arabic adolescent novel. From 2023 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Aix-Marseille University, where she was carrying out research on The 13 Devils, an Arab espionage/adventure series for adolescents. She has written on a number of subjects, including multicultural picture books; disability; Arabic adolescent literature and reading response. She is currently the Vice President of the Young Adult Studies Association and Senior Editor of the International Journal of Young Adult Literature.