Bryony Rheam at the Cairo International Book Fair

Bryony Rheam is to take part in a discussion session about her novel This September Sun, and its translation into Arabic, with the translator and others involved in the publication by Al-Arabi. She will also be available to sign copies of her book and to discuss it with those who have enjoyed the novel.

The event will take place at 3.00pm on Sunday 2 February at the Cairo International Book Fair.

This September Sun: The Novel with Legs

Bryony Rheam, whose debut novel, This September Sun, was first published in Zimbabwe in 2009, is set to travel to the 2020 Cairo International Book Fair at the beginning of February as a guest of honour.

The amaBooks cover

The Al-Arabi cover

The novel was launched at the Cairo International Book Fair at the beginning of 2019, having been translated into Arabic and published by the Egyptian publisher, Al-Arabi. The book fair is the largest and oldest book fair in the Arab world, held every year since 1969, and Al-Arabi have exhibited at the fair for forty years. Last year the fair attracted two and a half million visitors.

Cairo International Book Fair

According to Al-Arabi publisher Sherif Bakr, This September Sun has travelled the Arab world since the launch, from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf. In discussing last year's Cairo International Book Fair in an interview with ahramonline, Sherif Bakr said: “We did well; our new titles of translated novels and books in general were very well received with people being very happy to go through piles of books that bring to them ideas from Finland, Serbia, Austria, Zimbabwe and many other countries,” Bakr said.

"One of this year’s newly translated titles for Al-Arabi is the Arabic version of Bryony Rheam’s This September Sun, the gratifying novel that came out in late 2009, examining layers of the lives of the 'settlers' of Rhodesia that continue to haunt Zimbabwe’s grandchildren."

Sherif Bakr

This is the first Africa-centred novel translation for Al-Arabi that has otherwise, over the past four decades, brought to its readers a wide range of political readings on Africa.

The translation of the novel was agreed at the Frankfurt Book Fair in  2016 when Brian Jones, co-director of amaBooks and a participant at the Frankfurt Book Fair Invitation Programme, was introduced to Sherif Bakr by a colleague on the Invitation Programme, Aly Abdel-Moneim of Daraj Publishing. Aly had been enthralled by the description of This September Sun and thought that Al-Arabi publishers would be interested.

Bryony Rheam is very excited to be invited to Cairo and looks forward to meeting readers of her work based in the Arab world. Previously she has appeared at a number of festivals, including the Intwasa Arts Festival in Zimbabwe, the Ake Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria and Africa Utopia in the United Kingdom.

Al-Arabi publisher Sherif Bakr looks back on this year's Cairo International Book Fair and Bryony Rheam's This September Sun

Sherif Bakr

For over 40 years, Al-Arabi Publishing and Distributing has exhibited at the Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), with titles mainly in politics and mass media. For the past decade, however, it is translated titles, mostly fiction, that have attracted readers to this particular publishing house.

According to Al-Arabi publisher Sherif Bakr, this was a good year, with book fair visitors showing a true interest in learning more about the world.

“We did well; our new titles of translated novels and books in general were very well received with people being very happy to go through piles of books that bring to them ideas from Finland, Serbia, Austria, Zimbabwe and many other countries,” Bakr said.

The Al Arabi September Suns

One of this year’s newly translated titles for Al-Arabi is the Arabic version of Bryony Rheam’s “This September Sun,” the gratifying novel that came out in late 2009, examining layers of the lives of the “settlers” of Rhodesia that continue to haunt Zimbabwe’s grandchildren.

This is the first Africa-centred novel translation for Al-Arabi that has otherwise, over the past four decades, brought to its readers a wide range of political readings on Africa, including the Arabic translation of Wolfgang Bauer’s “Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram tell their story,” which came out in 2017.

Meanwhile, Bakr is hoping to bring out a translation of “Thirteen Cents,” a novel that approaches the shadowy side of life in Cape Town.

“I am hoping it will come out this year but it might have to be for the book fair next year, because translation does take a long time to be done properly,” Bakr said.

Bakr affirmed that he would like to bring more writers from Africa. “The trouble there is that African writers are either very well known (and those are usually the writers whose work is published in European countries that once colonised Africa) or are very difficult to trace. We are usually looking to get our readers acquainted with the less known rather than the well-known,” he said.

“I was, for example, very lucky to have met the Zimbabwean publishers of “This September Sun” at the Frankfurt book fair, so I learned about the book. I keep looking for African writers or otherwise for books written about Africa,” Bakr said.

“But yes, when we look at the map we have in the office, where we pin the countries that we had brought books from, we do feel that we still have so much to do on Africa,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bakr is happy to have seen the attention this year's book fair brought to Al-Arabi’s translation of “Purge,” a Finnish novel by Sofi Oksanen that looks at the political and social impact of the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union during World War II. The novel has been translated into near 40 languages.

“We translated from the English version, as we have been doing with a considerable number of titles, because usually it is easier to find literature translators who work from English into Arabic, and also because usually the English translation is a very good one,” Bakr said.

When he started off his translation section a little under 10 years ago, Bakr created a small team that was essentially translating and editing from English. Today, the team has expended and it is now working on translations from several European languages.

“Translation is usually a very taxing job, especially translation of literature. But we have a rule at Al-Arabi: we are making a translation that has to be an easy and enjoyable read, so we are not held captive to the exact, literal translation. I think this has been essential to our success in getting our readers acquainted with literature from all the continents,” he said.

This year, for CIBF, Al-Arabi issued 24 literary translations that they have been working on for over two years.

“Sometimes one thinks it would be easy, but things become slow. Like this year, we have a translation of an Armenian novel and we thought it should be an easy going process, given the large Egyptian Armenian community. But it took quite a bit of time to put the translation on the right path,” Bakr said.

According to Bakr, “Purge” is one of this year’s best selling for Al-Arabi. Another very well received book is the Arabic translation of “The Devil’s Workshop” of Czech novelist Jachym Topol, that examines the history of concentration camps in Belarus.

“With this book we had to spend over a year on the translation and editing, and inevitably we needed to invite the author for the revision of the final version of the book. It sometimes has to be this way. But it does not matter how long time it takes, so long as we come up with a good translation,” Bakr said.

Al-Arabi focuses on translating fiction. “I think of the books we translate, we do roughly 80 percent fiction and 20 percent non-fiction,” Bakr said. “I guess people are more interested in reading fiction. Actually, our readers are mostly young and are more into fiction generally,” he added.

Al-Arabi, Bakr said, is continually seeking titles that would attract younger readers. Currently, he added, Al-Arabi is working on the Arabic translation of an Australian novel, “Life on the Refrigerator,” that tells the story of a mother and daughter who end up communicating through sticky notes put on a fridge.

Bakr expects that this will be one of the novels to attract the "young adult" constituency of readers, which he says constitute a big audience for literature.

Al-Arabi is also behind three Arabic fiction titles for this year: “Tamar” by May Khaled; “Frames of Emptiness” (Otor min Faragh) by Amr Afiyah and “The Prisoner of Muscat” (Sagine Mascat) by Al-Sherbiny Ashour.

“One should never underestimate the impact of literature on people’s lives. It induces them to think of things and feel things that might be life-changing, literally and not metaphorically,” Bakr said.

From: http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/325262.aspx

This September Sun at the Cairo International Book Fair

LOCAL author Bryony Rheam’s novel, This September Sun, was launched at the ongoing Cairo International Book Fair on Wednesday after it was translated into Arabic, NewsDay Life & Style has heard.

The novel was first published in 2009 by amaBooks in Bulawayo, while a second edition was published in 2012.

Brian Jones, an amaBooks Publishers director, said the book was published by an Egyptian publishing company Al Arabi, which launched 43 other titles at the book fair.

“Al Arabi will also distribute the Arabic version of the book across the Arab world, where the English version is already available through the Jordan-based website jamalon.com. The rights to the novel have been acquired for Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan by Longhorn Press, and for the United Kingdom by Parthian Books. The book topped the United Kingdom Amazon charts, as an ebook, in June 2013,” he said.

This September Sun won the Best First Book Award at the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Awards and was a Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council ‘A’ Level Literature in English setbook between 2013 and 2017.

Egyptian publisher, Sherif Bakr described This September Sun, which is one of the longest novels at the fair, as “huge, but beautiful”.

Rheam is an ardent fan of Agatha Christie, a passion inherited from her grandmother. As testimony to this enthusiasm for Christie, she won the international Write Your Own Christie competition, which involved writing a chapter of a novel in the style of Agatha Christie, following on from chapters of previous winners.

Her eagerly anticipated second novel, All Come to Dust, is undergoing final edits before being published by amaBooks in Zimbabwe in a few months’ time.

In 2018, Rheam was awarded a Morland Writing Scholarship to support her while she was writing her third novel, The Dying of the Light, set in Bulawayo just as some of her previous novels.

This article, written by Sharon S Sibindi, appeared in NewsDay on 25 January 2019.

https://www.newsday.co.zw/2019/01/local-author-at-egyptian-fair/

The front cover of the Arabic version of 'This September Sun'

The front cover of the translation into Arabic of Bryony Rheam's This September Sun, to be launched by Al Arabi Publishing and Distribution at January's Cairo International Book Fair.

'This September Sun' in Arabic

Bryony Rheam's novel This September Sun has been translated into Arabic by Al Arabi Publishers and will be launched on 23 January, 2019, at the Cairo International Book Fair. It is going to be one of our longest fiction books this year at the fair. We are excited at the prospect of the Arabic cover, which has not been finalised.