If Palestinian literature is truly a literature of exile—one that focuses on memory and redeeming the geography and lives shattered in 1948—the Six-Day War in 1967 brought about a different tradition…
Essay
August 19, 2025
August 12, 2025This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungarian author Miklós Vámos’s most successful work, Apák könyve (2000; The Book of Fathers, 2006). In this essay from the…
July 16, 2025Albert Cossery / Courtesy of New Directions The end of June marked the anniversary of the death of Albert Cossery (1913–2008), a French-speaking Egyptian writer who is not particularly famous, but…
June 17, 2025Nigerian writer, editor, and scholar Chibueze Darlington Anuonye’s pioneering essay on contemporary Nigerian poetry, “Facebook Writers: The Emergence of a New Generation of Nigerian Writers,” was rece…
May 8, 2025Tjeerd Braat / Unsplash.com Olga Zilberbourg discovers the flora of the United States Botanic Garden—the oldest living forced migrants to the US—and a Russian writer…
May 6, 2025Kwame Dawes / Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts Kwame Dawes, who was until recently the Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner, served the magazine for thirteen years. He broug…
April 23, 2025Photo by pink candy / Adobe Stock The following is adapted from the editor’s note introducing What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays on Immigration, now out from Restle…
April 4, 2025Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland / Photo by Sean Kuriyan / Unsplash What does it mean to be a Northern Irish writer? Decades after the end of the Troubles, it remains a difficult…
March 27, 2025Ukraine Right Now, a poster by seventeen-year-old artist Polina Pustovit from Zaporizhzhia, which is undergoing daily attacks / Courtesy of the artist Ukrainians are fighting for their…
March 5, 2025Photo by THP Creative / Adobe Stock The author weighs the benefit of grammar guides’ standardization of language against their history of neglecting the language of underprivileged groups, comp…
February 27, 2025Kwame Dawes courtesy of Blue Flower Arts “It is evident,” writes Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, “that the combination of Kwame Dawes’s bicontinental heritage and love for his father and family has…
February 26, 2025Photo by Igne B / Unsplash The author explores some common issues in translation and how they might affect translation of queer texts. Moving away from purely theoretical discussions, the…
January 27, 2025Photo by DRasa / Adobe Stock This somber but inventive essay was adapted from an address Edith Bruck gave in 2018, and as the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the eightie…
December 6, 2024Photo of Han Kang by Paik Dahuim / Courtesy of Natur & Kultur Like a clutch of words strewn over white paper. Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. Turning to look behind me,…
March 19, 2024Photo by Christopher Michel / Flickr Feng Jicai looks into the life of Parisians and their unique “street kiss” culture. He is mesmerized by the affection that they share unapologetically, in…
March 13, 2024A writer considers home as she remembers her partner of fifty-one years. I was born in Vienna and grew up in Australia. We didn’t speak German at home. My parents were “new” Australians for…
January 30, 2024Illustration by Marla Johnson “When Dogs Could Talk” appeared in WLT’s landmark 2007 issue devoted to endangered languages, guest-edited by Sydneyann Binion and David Shook, who…
November 9, 2023The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia / Photo by G. S. Matthews / Flickr Reflecting on a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia and on the Dirty War in Argen…
October 10, 2023Photo by Alexander Grey / Unsplash In this follow-up piece connected to her “The Keepers of the Books” essay in WLT’s May 2023 cover feature, Alice-Catherine Carls examines the role o…
August 17, 2023Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan. What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of a…
August 2, 2023Photo by Daniel Bernard / Unsplash A translator discovers that an author—whom she has translated and admired for so long—was complicit in a past administration’s efforts to silence dissenting…
June 29, 2023Photo by Javardh / Unsplash Carlos Labbé wonders whether it is “still possible to speak of experimental writing when we live in a reality where facts are constantly written in a language alrea…
June 21, 2023Photo by JR P / Flickr In her new essay collection, These Particular Women (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023), Kat Meads writes about famous twentieth-century women, mostly authors. In th…
June 8, 2023Photo by Bekky Bekks / Unsplash Hoping to see more peace and empathy in the world, a high school teacher in San Francisco creates a Peace Club where, in yielding control of an event to a sixte…
March 8, 2023Scene from Performance Survivor’s Syndrome, based on a work by Andriy Bondarenko, Harmyder Theater (Lutsk, Ukraine), directed by Ruslana Porytska (@ruslana.porytska), starring Vadym Khainskyi (@v…
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