In the following tribute, Yousef Khanfar pens a letter to the eminent scholar Salma Khadra Jayyusi, laureate of the 2021 Palestine Prize for Literature, who passed away on April 20, 2023.
Dea…
Literary Tributes
August 10, 2023
June 20, 20231 The 1984 Neustadt Prize banquet honored Finnish writer Paavo Haavikko. Left to right: Astrid Ivask, Ritva Rainio, Paavo Haavikko, Dolores Neustadt, Doris Westheimer Neustadt, and Walter Neustadt J…
November 23, 2021Photo by Ann Arbor When we heard the news of Robert Bly’s passing yesterday, our thoughts turned not only to his poetry but to his prolific career as a translator. In these pages alone, reviews of Bl…
April 14, 2021Photo by Jerry Bauer I was waiting for a tennis court on the lakeshore in Chicago when I read that Adam Zagajewski died. I have always considered tennis like writing: you practice to get into a rhyth…
March 24, 2021Nawal in Stockholm / Courtesy of the author It is a herculean task to attempt to capture essence of the writer, physician, and global activist Nawal El Saadawi. There is so much to say, the littl…
March 22, 2021When we heard the news yesterday that Adam Zagajewski had passed away at the age of seventy-five in Kraków, Poland, we immediately thought not only of his exceptional poetry and essays but also o…
December 11, 2020Theodore Ziolkowski in 1992 / Photo by Robert Matthews, Princeton University Our strolls through the cemeteries of Berlin, then, are no more funereal and depressing than, say, the performance of…
January 18, 2019Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash In an American age characterized by fragmentation and political division, it takes the passage of a literary icon like Mary Oliver to remind us how we have been bound toge…
May 16, 2018In the days before his death, Sergio Pitol had been much on my mind: the sordid stories of neglect splashed across Mexico’s leading newspapers; court battles for his guardianship; accusations of thef…
May 1, 2017Mexican novelist and short-story writer Jorge López Páez died on Friday, April 28, at the age of ninety-four. Ernesto Reséndiz Oikión offers a tribute.Jorge López Páez. Photo: CNL-INBA Archiv…
August 31, 2016Ignacio Padilla (date unknown) / Source: Ibero 90.9 Translator’s note: Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla (1968–2016) was killed in a car accident on August 20 while traveling through…
June 27, 2016Jorge Luis Borges Because June 14 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), I received a couple of calls, asking if I would be interested in answering some quest…
September 23, 2015Roberto Fernández Retamar in 2015,illustration by Michael Hoeweler. This started out as a book review of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Poesía nueva reunida (Letras Cubanas and Ediciones Unión,…
August 4, 2015Alan Cheuse by Josh Cheuse | Courtesy of NPR The editors of WLT were deeply saddened to hear the news of Alan Cheuse’s passing last week at the age of seventy-five. Dr. Cheuse s…- April 14, 2015Photo: H. Grunert / www.nobelprize.org. The Winter 2000 issue of WLT featured “To Be Continued . . .”, the English translation of…
April 14, 2015Photo: H. Grunert / www.nobelprize.org When it was announced on Monday that Nobel laureate Günter Grass had passed away in Lübeck, Germany, at the age of eighty-seven, we asked…
April 6, 2015As the United States Postal Service hosts a stamp dedication event tomorrow in Washington, DC, for the release of their Maya Angelou Forever stamp, we’re delighted to share images of the new stamp as…
April 2, 2015The executive director, editors, and staff at World Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma are saddened to hear of Astrid Ivask’s death. In her time at the University of Oklahoma in…
March 30, 2015Tomas Tranströmer delivering his acceptance speech for the Neustadt Prize in June 1990. When news broke late last week that Nobel Prize laureate Tomas Tranströmer had died in St…
February 9, 2015Assia Djebar. Photo by Irmeli Jung. The editors and staff of World Literature Today were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Algerian-born novelist, translator, and filmmaker Assia…
December 22, 2014in memoriam Kenny Kahn From the archive of Eugenia Huerta Bravo. A trio of important Mexican writers was born in 1914: Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, and Efraín Huerta. In the English-languag…
September 5, 2014Oklahoma writer Dorothy Alexander remembers fellow poet Jim Spurr, a true “everyman poet.” Jim Spurr left this earthy existence on Sunday, August 31, 2014, after having one of the best days o…
July 14, 2014Photo by Bengt Oberger In honor of Nadine Gordimer, who passed away yesterday at the age of ninety, we reprint here her testimonial from our Winter 1996 issue, devoted to “South…
May 28, 2014Photos by Gil Jain / Western History Collections / The University of Oklahoma The editors and staff of World Literature Today join in mourning the passing while celebrat…
April 18, 2014When news broke yesterday about the death of Gabriel García Márquez, the entire staff of World Literature Today paused to reflect on the legacy of a writer who not only redrew t…
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