Hisham Bustani

Hisham Bustani (b. Amman, 1975) is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of post-colonial modernity in the Arab world. Critics have described his writing as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and “[he] belongs to an angry new Arab generation. Indeed, he is at the forefront of this generation – combining an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change…His anger extends to encompass everything, including literary conventions.” His work has been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. His fiction has been collected in such anthologies as The Best Asian Short Stories; The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds; The Radiance of the Short Story: Fiction From Around the Globe, and Influence and Confluence – East and West: A Global Anthology on the Short Story. Bustani’s story collection The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (trans. Maia Tabet) was published in 2022 by Mason Jar Press. He tweets @H_Bustani.

Addie Leak is a co-translator of Mostafa Nissabouri’s For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert (2018, Otis Books), and her translations from French and Arabic have also been featured in SOUFFLES-ANFAS: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (2015, Stanford University Press), Words Without Borders, The Common, Exchanges, Shuddhashar, The Huffington Post, and more. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA in literary translation, a 2023 attendee of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and a former Fulbrighter in Jordan, where she lived for six years.