Katharine Halls

Rasha Abbas writes surreal short stories, combining dream and hyper-realism with a punk aesthetic. A Syrian writer and journalist, she has been based in Berlin since 2015. Her debut short story collection Adam Hates TV was awarded at the Damascus Capital of Arab Culture Festival. In 2016 her much-noted collection The Invention of German and her Christmas story “A Lonesome Red Glass of Coca Cola” were published in German translation by mikrotext, where she also published her short story collection The Gist of It in German. Abbas is currently working on a novel inspired by her family’s history.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed and her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival, and short texts have appeared with World Literature Today, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Adda, Africa is A Country, Newfound, Critical Muslim, The Common, and Arts of the Working Classes, and in various anthologies.