Bio

William Maynard Hutchins has translated many works of Arabic literature into English, including Return of the Spirit by Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Cairo Trilogy by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Fetishists by Ibrahim al-Koni. His translation of New Waw by al-Koni won the ALTA National Prose Translation Award for 2015. A two-time NEA Translation Fellow, Hutchins' translations from the Arabic have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail and Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, and on Words Without Borders, as well as elsewhere. He holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Chicago and has taught subjects ranging from English and Arabic to philosophy and religious studies at the Gerard School in Sidon, Lebanon; the University of Ghana; the American University in Cairo; and Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Project Description

To support the translation from the Arabic of the novel A Small Death by Saudi Arabian author Mohammed Hasan Alwan. Alwan (b. 1979) has published five novels and was chosen in 2009 as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 40 by Beirut39, an international collaborative project that celebrated promising Arab writers. A Small Death, published in 2016, is a fictionalized first-person account of the life of a Sufi saint, Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, from before his birth in Muslim Spain in the 12th century to his death in Damascus. A spiritual coming-of-age story of one of Islam's greatest mystics, the novel won the tenth International Prize for Arabic Fiction and has never been translated into English.