PEN Translation grants: applications due February 3

Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are due in two weeks. Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000 and support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.

In addition to financial assistance, grants from the PEN Translation Fund provide a good bit of publicity: recognition by the Fund has led on numerous occasions to a publishing contract. Translations supported by PEN grants have been excerpted in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review -- and, of course, in PEN America.

February 3rd is also the deadline for most other PEN Awards. You can find out more information here.

Submissions for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports Writing, and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award are due by March 3rd.

PEN round-up: Don DeLillo, World Voices, Mexican journalists, and more

As we put the finishing touches on the fall issue, the PEN office is bustling.

Today, the 2010 PEN Literary Award winners were announced. Among them, Don DeLillo, who answered questions from PEN (via fax) on the occasion:

PEN: Thanks to e-books, blogs, and social media, writers are arguably using new technology as never before. Stories are written using Twitter, novels as text messages, and there seems to be a reemergence of serial narratives. Do you think technology will have a considerable influence on fiction? Do you think it already has?

DeLillo: The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

To celebrate DeLillo’s award, our fall issue will include his 1983 short story “Human Moments in World War III,” the beginning of which you can read on PEN.org. For the rest, pre-order your copy of the issue (or subscribe!).

And, if you’re in New York, join us for the 2010 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on October 13.

News of this year’s winners followed just a day after PEN announced its new Director of the World Voices Festival and Public Programs, László Jakab Orsós, who joins PEN from the Hungarian Cultural Center. Jakab is also an accomplished journalist and screenwriter. You can read more about him here. The 2011 World Voices Festival will be held from April 25 to May 1.

Lastly, a trio of announcements from the Freedom to Write department: Liao Yiwu (discussed previously on the blog) has finally been permitted to travel outside China; PEN writers urged the U.N. to abandon efforts to legally prohibit the defamation of religion; and several writers from Mexico and the United States (including DeLillo) will gather next month to discuss and call attention to the violent suppression of journalists in America’s neighbor to the south. Please join us if you can.

Translate these books

The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a wonderful feature called “Translate This Book!” The editors talked to “some of the top translators into English working today,” to “publishers big and small,” to “agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors,” and then compiled their thoughts on “the best books that still aren’t in English.” It's a great list, with illuminating commentary from those surveyed. Here’s Enrique Vila-Matas on a book by Rodrigo Fresán (whose very funny conversation with Jonathan Lethem ran in PEN America 8: Making Histories, along with part of Fresán's novel Kensington Gardens):

In El fondo del cielo (The Bottom of the Sky), Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds. It’s the book of the future, the book that begins to write itself when everything has ended: the story of two young people in love with planets, and of a disturbingly beautiful girl. Between Bioy Casares and Philip K. Dick, but with a voice all its own, it is both powerful and artistic.

Check out the rest.

As the eagle-eyed (and long-memoried) M.A. Orthofer points out, we did something similar in PEN America 2: Home and Away, asking members of PEN “What great books have never been translated into English?” We got great responses from Ariel Dorfman, Lily Tuck, Harry Mathews, Geoffrey O’Brien, and many others. (Dorfman, by the way, managed to sneak in another recommendation in our latest forum: Ayer ya es maňana, or Yesterday Is Already Tomorrow, by Eduardo Vladimiroff).

That forum led to PEN Recommends, an updated feature on the PEN website which lists books not yet translated into English.

Orthofer also flagged a response to the same question by the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in an interview for The Millions by Anna Clark. Surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky—best known for their translations of Anna Karenina and other Russian classics—did not focus on Russian writers in their reply, but Italian ones, singling out Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti.

And yet another reply appeared on the film blog that Richard Brody—who won the 2009 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* for Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard—maintains for The New Yorker. In The Quarterly Conversation, Turkish writer Murat Nemet-Nejat suggested Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Brody seconds that suggestion before adding:

...another Godard-related book is desperately in need of translation: “En Attendant Godard” (“Waiting for Godard”), the journalist, novelist, and (later) screenwriter and director Michel Vianey’s account of accompanying Godard through the production of “Masculine Feminine,” in 1965-66. It’s the most illuminating and evocative book about movie-making I know; it came out in 1967 and has never even been reissued in France. (The author, who became a close friend of mine, died last December at the age of seventy-eight.)

* The deadline to submit a book for the 2010 award is Monday. Deadlines for other PEN awards are mostly in January. More information here.

Subscription offer & launch party

This year, PEN partnered with the long-standing O. Henry Prize, which annually selects twenty of the year’s best stories written in English. The latest edition of the anthology includes stories by Junot Díaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and many other excellent writers.

While supplies last, we are giving copies of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 to all new PEN America subscribers. A one-year subscription is just $18, and you can subscribe online at www.pen.org/subscribe.

Subscriptions begin with our brand new issue #11, Make Believe, which we’re celebrating on Monday in New York City. Paul Auster and Roxana Robinson will read short selections from the issue, and several other contributors—including Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Cynthia Cruz, and Lynne Tillman—will also be there. The event is free and open to the public. Details below.


PEN America #11 Launch Party
When: Monday, October 26
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street (between Sullivan & Thompson), NYC
What time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.

With Paul Auster, Roxana Robinson, and other special guests

Free and open to the public

Iran reading this Saturday + links

This Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 5 pm, the Bowery Poetry Club will host a free event entitled “Literatures of Resistance: An Afternoon in Solidarity with the Iranian People.” Among the readers are PEN Award-winner Dalia Sofer and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose writing appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

The following Wednesday, as previously mentioned, PEN is co-sponsoring a forum on Iran with The New York Review of Books and the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

The translators’ roundtable over at The Observer Translation Project has been fairly widely noted; also worth reading there is the “Letter from Chişinău,” by Moldovan journalist Leo Butnaru, about the relationship between literature and politics -- and, more specifically, the current political situation in Moldova.

And speaking of writers and politics: Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on June 23 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN considers this arrest “transparently abusive” and “a deeply disappointing and anachronistic denial of Liu’s right to freedom of expression under Chinese and international law.” Liu Xiaobo is one of the authors of Charter 08, calling for democratic reform in China; you can sign a petition to free him here.

And lastly, a plea for the theremin, the musical instrument that inspired Petr Zelenka’s play, which itself is about -- among other things -- the arts under communism. Part of the play appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, and was read, on one occasion, by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl.

Bolaño’s fears, Armenian fiction, etc.

Elissa Bassist has cataloged “the phobias in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” for The Rumpus -- a catalog that, though I’ve not yet read the book, naturally caught my eye. Among the fears:

Tricophobia: “fear of hair” (where some “cases end in suicide”)

Optophobia: “fear of opening the eyes” (this is “even worse” than the fear of eyes because “in a literal sense, it leads to violent attacks, loss of consciousness, visual and auditory hallucinations, and generally aggressive behavior”)

Phobophobia: “fear of fear itself” (Campos comments, “If you’re afraid of your own fears, you’re forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle.”)

Last night, it so happens, Natasha Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize for 2666. According to the judges, Wimmer’s “moving translation... perfectly matches the considerable emotional heft of this vast, man-faceted novel, now rightly seen as a milestone in world literature.”

Also celebrated last night were the PEN Translation Fund Grants, which “support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.” Most of these projects are currently without publishers, though if the past is any guide, that will likely change after this recognition.

Among this year’s recipients is Geoffrey Michael Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a historical novel widely considered, according to the citation, “one of the greatest masterpieces of Armenian literature,” written in the early 1930s “to save what remained of our people.” You can read an excerpt at Words Without Borders. The introduction to that excerpt describes the book as

a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians told through the horrific collapse of a family -- the Nalbandians. The book was to have three parts, but Oshagan was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to teh extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated.

The Armenian genocide has been in the news here lately, since Obama -- who said that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide” during the presidential campaign -- has been treading carefully through the matter lately. And, of course, Orhan Pamuk’s frank acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is what got him in trouble with the Turkish government -- trouble that, sadly, has recently revived.

In happier news, via the Literary Saloon, Pamuk’s novel Snow recently became the first of his books to appear in Armenian. And speaking of both Armenian artists and The Rumpus, that fledgling website has a new interview up with Atom Egoyan.


PS. I’ve updated the previous post to include a link to Rawi Hage’s piece in the new issue, which is available online. And as long as I'm updating that post, this letter from an Army National Guard lieutenant colonel makes, I think, for a powerful coda.

PEN on YouTube

PEN American Center now has a page on YouTube. There you'll find Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo talking about freedom of expression in his country, Sam Shepard reading from his notebooks, Sufjan Stevens performing solo on the piano-- and much more, including this magnificently eloquent speech by Toni Morrison, delivered at the PEN gala last year:

Beyond Margins, Brooklyn, Obama, etc.

Jane Ciabattari, president of the NBCC and PEN Member, has written an excellent recap of "Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective," held in connection with the PEN Beyond Margins Awards.

Those PEN podcasts from the Brooklyn Book Festival, mentioned here a few weeks back, have gone online.

The Somali-Speaking Center of International PEN is holding a literary festival, "The Word and the Way to a Better World," in London.

Amitava Kumar and Chad Post have nice things to say about the new issue. Chad particularly enjoys the conversations-- a couple of which I've mentioned before. One I've not yet mentioned features Ian McEwan and Steven Pinker, and was recently noticed by www.IanMcEwan.com.

And the Literary Saloon flags this article in which McCain and Obama are each asked to name a favorite book. They both choose novels: Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon, respectively. Morrison expressed her own admiration for Obama back in January, and Obama has discussed his literary side before. In fact, the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín recently compared him to James Baldwin. (Image above via the New Pages blog.)

This week's events: Beyond Margins

Don't forget about this week's events, starting tonight at 7 with "The Present Past: Celebrating Writers of Color," the 2008 Beyond Margins Award Ceremony, and continuing tomorrow with "Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective," co-presented by PEN and the NBCC.

You can also now read work by this year's winners (Chris Abani, Amiri Baraka, Frances Hwang, Joseph Marshall III, and Naeem Murr) over at PEN.org.

Update: Tomorrow's event, which is at Housing Works, also begins at 7 pm, and should last about an hour. So there will be plenty of time to get home for the last presidential debate.

October events in NYC

This Sunday, October 5, at 1:30 pm, a number of writers will gather at the Bowery Poetry Club to celebrate the poetry and life of Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). This is part of the worldwide reading devoted to Darwish that has been spearheaded by The International Literature Festival Berlin.

The event will feature readings, words, and memories from Breyten Breytenbach, Pierre Joris, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Chuck Wachtel, Farah Ghniem, Ghassan Nasr, Danae Elon, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Ala Alryyes, Ammiel Alcalay, and Archipelago Books. Zafer Tawil will present a musical performance on the oud, and refreshments will be served following the event.

(You can read Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish here, and his tribute to the Palestinian poet here.)

On Tuesday, October 14, PEN America 9 contributor Xiaolu Guo will talk with Ian Buruma about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution on contemporary China. They’ll speak at the Asia Society and Museum at 7 pm.

(You can read Xiaolu’s story about a call girl in contemporary Beijing, “Reunion,” here.)

Also on Tuesday at 7 pm, PEN will hold this year’s Beyond Margins Celebration at the Bruno Walter Auditorium. “The Present Past: Celebrating Writers of Color” will feature Amiri Baraka, Joseph M. Marshall III, and special guests for an evening of readings and discussion on how cultural history affects writers’ perceptions of the present and the future. The event is free but seating is limited. RSVP to awards@pen.org or (212) 334-1660, ext 108. Please give your full name and indicate whether or not you will be bringing a guest.

The next night, PEN and the National Book Critics Circle will present “Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective,” a panel discussion about the critic’s role in championing the works of writers of color moderated by PEN Member and NBCC President Jane Ciabattari and featuring Joseph Marshall III, Ibrahim Ahmad, Margo Jefferson, and Rigoberto González. At 7 pm at Housing Works Used Bookstore Café. Free and open to the public.

This, by the way, is Banned Books Week.

Fady Joudah on Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Mahmoud Darwish was and is a colossal figure in modern Arabic poetry. He passed away Saturday in Houston, Texas after heart surgery. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and doctor who lives in Houston and was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Butterfly's Burden, a collection of three recent books by Darwish. Two of these poems appear in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with two new poems by Joudah, who recently won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. (One of these poems provided our new issue with its title.)


Mahmoud Darwish was and will remain a rare phenomenon in the world of letters, a poet whose constant dialogue with place and time (or non place and non time) have thrust him in the hearts and minds of millions of people. He was as extraordinary and private as he was universal and public.

A tender, shy man, with a sense of humor and satire, he was dedicated to the art of poetry and was not concerned with his public image, but never disdainful of it, always respectful of, and indebted to, his readers. His complex language that incessantly bears the illusion of accessibility is laden with paradox and complex metaphor. He was not only the truest and most beautiful expression of Palestine and Palestinians but also of the Arab world. He is dearly loved in Tunis and Morocco as he is in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt and across the Gulf. And he was also celebrated and honored the world over.

Mahmoud Darwish loved life, and loved it in its full adornment and dignity and did not want it compromised. He would not want sorrow to define him. He would rather “We Love Life” and “Remember after (him) only life”…And he would want not necessarily the fixation on the elegiac and the historico-political in his poetry, but a celebration of his eulogy for life and language. He was an innovator of prosody and contemporary rhythms in Arabic, a philosopher of the self and its stranger others, ever the interlocutor. I can only hope that the day will soon come, especially in English, when Darwish’s night and dream, jasmine and almond blossoms are seen for what they are, the private lexicon of a singular and eternal, timeless voice in the history of human literature.


Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American, is a physician. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007. He has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001.

Reading tonight + other news

As previously mentioned: debut author Uwem Akpan will read and speak with Anderson Tepper at Housing Works tonight at 7.

An expat zine in Moscow may be shut down by the Russian government. (See also.)

China is still detaining writers.

If you want even more Walser, the tribute from World Voices is now online. Other events continue to go up as the audio becomes available.

Lastly, a feature on the PEN Awards is up at PEN.org, and includes selections from such winners as Cynthia Ozick (a great piece from her latest book, Dictation) and Sarah Ruhl (part of her Pulitzer finalist, The Clean House)-- plus a bit from Richard Nelson's Conversations in Tusculum, which has come up on this blog before. You can also listen to awards ceremony and see Beowulf Sheehan's photos from the event.

Notes on a Wednesday

After discovering that Barack Obama is a fan of Philip Roth (and David Grossman), Jeffrey Goldberg asked readers for "a couple of paragraphs describing what a Philip Roth-influenced Obama White House would look like." And he's picked a couple of winners.

Rumbles have been brewing in the usually peaceful worlds of literary magazines and literary translation. I'm looking forward to the "mini-manifesto" from VQR editor Ted Genoways.

I'm also looking forward to Franzen's answer.

Our editor, M Mark, is headed to Jamaica this week to participate in the Calabash Literary Festival, which aims to "transform the literary arts in the Caribbean." She'll be joining PEN America 8 contributor Chris Abani, among other great authors, and will be featured on a panel about editing collections.

And the PEN Literary Awards ceremony was a treat. PEN.org should have audio soon. (Photo below by Beowulf Sheehan; that's Jonathan Ames among the winners.)

Ozick headlines PEN reading @ KGB Bar (5/20)

Cynthia Ozick, winner of this year's PEN/Nabokov Award, will read at 7 PM on Tuesday, May 20, at KGB Bar, along with Alex Mindt (Bingham finalist) and Theresa Nelson (Naylor Fellow), in a celebration of the PEN Literary Awards. The evening will be hosted by Elissa Schappell, the chair of the PEN Awards Committee and a co-founder of the great magazine Tin House.

Update: Margaret Jull Costa, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her rendition of The Maias by Eça de Queirós, will also be there.

This event is free and open to the public.

PS. Speaking of Ozick, her recent review of Lionel Trilling's fiction, noted by Scott Esposito, is typically astute.

Notes before the deluge

World Voices kicks off today, with five events, from “Crisis Darfur” with Mia Farrow and Bernard Henri-Levy (co-sponsored by Guernica) to the “Literary Film Feast” (not “fest,” apparently) co-presented by Ratapallax. Then: seven events on Wednesday, twenty-four (!) events on Thursday, fourteen events on Friday…

So, before I (very happily) lose myself in the rushing literary waters, a few notes:

The recipients of this year’s PEN awards have been announced. Among the winners: Cynthia Ozick, Sarah Ruhl, Kimiko Hahn, Dalia Sofer, and many more…

The indispensable Complete Review flags this piece from the Lebanese Daily Star about The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran—which has just issued a statement that writers wishing to be published in Iran must censor themselves. As it happens, we have a great short piece by Iranian novelist and story-writer Shahriar Mandanipour about just this sort of thing in PEN America 8.

A choose-your-own-adventure story from Mohsin Hamid (via Amitava).

Lastly, the PEN gala was last night, and I’ll try to flag some coverage of it later. Toni Morrison gave a stirring acceptance speech for the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award, and a wonderful Iraqi translator who goes by the pseudonym Ahmed Ali spoke movingly about fleeing Iraq and re-locating, eventually, to Atlanta, with the help of PEN’s Larry Siems. There was also a heartbreaking video tribute to this year’s PEN/Barbarba Goldsmith Freedom to Write honoree, Yang Tongyan, who is currently incarcerated in China.

Though not quite so important, another satisfying part of the evening was hearing nice things about the journal from Nathan Englander (who raved about the Etgar Keret stories and the George Saunders piece) and Gary Shteyngart (who described it as “muy caliente”) and Sidney Offit (who praised the Grace Paley tribute), among others. If you haven’t already, check it out (or just subscribe).

Update: Coverage of the gala here, here, here, and here.

"Neatly transcending space-time"

On the spot where I write all this hodgepodge of verses

stands Edward Hopper, in fact, who engenders them

and who, neatly transcending space-time, sends me

the signals.

Lawrence Venuti translates Ernest Farrés for Words Without Borders, devoted this time around to literature in Catalan.

Speaking of translation, you can download a PDF of To Be Translated or Not to Be, "a report on the state of international literary translation" put together by International PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull of Barcelona.

PEN American Center is currently accepting nominations and submissions for the 2008 literary awards-- including the new PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. There are also awards for drama, poetry, work in translation, and debut fiction. Deadlines are in December and January; more details here.

Monday Miscellany

Tonight at 7, at the Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan, PEN will celebrate the winners of this year's Beyond Margins awards: novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (for Half of a Yellow Sun), poet Harryette Mullen (for Recyclopedia), critic Ernest Hardy (for Bloodbeats Vol. 1), and poet Alberto Álvaro Ríos (for Theater of Night).

Jaime Manrique and Sonia Sanchez will host an evening saluting the winners of the 2007 Beyond Margins Award. Joining in the celebration will be writers Adam Haslett, Marie Ponsot, and Monique Truong.

The evening will feature readings and conversation with this year's winners, as well as a reception following the event.

It is free and open to the public.

John Freeman has been blogging from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and he gives a mention to Eurozine, the multi-lingual online magazine with some great pieces on literature in several different languages. (Don't miss the "set language" button to the above right of those pieces.) Freeman mentions a piece on the "next great Estonian novel"; looking it over quickly, I didn't see any mention of the Truth and Justice pentalogy. Too old? (See also: Conversational Reading.)

Lastly, courtesy of Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean, those who have either worked on or submitted something to-- or possibly even read-- a literary magazine may enjoy The Futility Review, "dedicated to the non-publication of the best works of the best poets in the English-speaking world," where "any poet, no matter whether accomplished or beginning, will be rejected in the same open-handed manner." Be sure to check out the submission guidelines:

Does your submission contain any of these words: shard, limn, or numinous?

Regrettably, Yes

Do your poems mention grandma or your first dog?

What's wrong with that?

Is there any mention of butterflies or unicorns in your work?

Just in that one place

PS. Italo Calvino was born on this day in 1923. (He died on September 19, 1985.) Read tributes to Calvino by Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, from PEN America 1: Classics.

Saadi Youssef on the freedom of Arabic

The September edition of Wild River Review is up, and it contains a long, illuminating interview with Saadi Youssef, the Iraqi poet who left his native country in 1978 and "lived in many countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe before settling in the U.K. in 1999." The interview was conducted during the PEN World Voices festival by Wild River Review founder Joy E. Stocke, who asks Youssef about the Arabic language, and gets this reply:

Well it is a very free language. I mean you can create new words in Arabic. So, you can say that it is an open language, a language that a poet can always renew. If you know Arabic well with a classical formation, in a way you will be more free because you will see more things. You can work within the language to create a new word and it will be understood. It will not be considered strange.

For example, when you hear the church bell toll, or ring. In Arabic, if you take the past tense for the sound of a bell ringing — the bell rang — I can extend the sense of time that it takes for a bell to ring. Instead of saying rang, I can use the language to create a new word that shows the extended way a bell rings, how the sound moves through the air. I create a new word because I need to do so, and a reader of Arabic will understand. In fact a reader of Arabic will expect it.

We printed a selection from Youssef’s first major English collection, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, in PEN America 5: Silences. The collection was translated by Khaled Mattawa and published by Graywolf in 2002. It won the 2003 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

More about Youssef, who was born near Basra in 1934, here.