BIOGRAPHY
Alice Guthrie is an independent Arabic literary consultant and writer specializing in Arabic-English translation. Her practice involves translating, editing, assessing, curating, teaching, agenting and promoting contemporary Arabic literatures, as well as advocating for improvements across the whole Arabic-English translation sector. Her literary translations have been widely published since 2008. Among various accolades over the years, she won the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize 2019 for her translation of Gazan author Atef Abu Saif’s The Lottery. As an independent Associate Lecturer, Alice teaches Arabic-English translation at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the University of Exeter, and has had visiting appointments at Masters level at the universities of East Anglia and Birmingham, GUST in Kuwait, and Olive Writers in Casablanca. She is an agent at 10/11, and has curated the literary strand at London’s biennale of Arab cultures, Shubbak, for many years. Alice’s newest venture is Siratna (سيرتنا), an exclusive service creating deluxe bespoke bilingual family history volumes for private clients to hand down as heirlooms, from generation to generation.
10/11
is a new collective of translators, based in Germany and the UK, who promote bold contemporary Arabic literature in European languages. Founded by prolific Arabic-German translator Sandra Hetzl, 10/11 expanded with the arrival of Arabic-English translators Katharine Halls and Alice Guthrie. The three share a vision of taking Arabic literature out of the realms of niche venues and specialist publishers and into the mainstream European literary scene. 10/11 functions as a unique kind of literary agency, connecting the authors whose work Sandra, Katharine and Alice translate with publishers who want to publish Arabic titles but don’t know where to start. The practice of translation lies at the heart of 10/11’s work, reflecting Alice, Katharine and Sandra’s belief that Arabic literature can only thrive in other languages when it is translated lovingly by translators who are passionate and knowledgeable. The three also share resources and critique each other’s work, finding collaboration and idea-sharing to be a vital complement to the individual creativity of literary translation.
PROJECT
Katharine Halls and Alice Guthrie will be in residence at Nawat Fes from January to March 2024. They will be using their time in Fes to immerse themselves in the Moroccan literary scene, expanding and consolidating their existing networks and researching new Moroccan literature to translate, as well as dedicating time and deep focus to the Moroccan books they’ve been wanting to read for ages. While in residence, they will begin translating several Moroccan literary works into English, prepare translation samples in order to promote Moroccan books to European publishers, and offer a number of public workshops. Alice will be building on a longstanding interest in Moroccan literature, having translated texts by several late great Moroccan writers: Aziz Benhaddouch, Mohamed Zafzaf, and most notably Malika Moustadraf, whose collected short fiction appeared in her translation in 2022 as Blood Feast (Feminist Press) and Something Strange, Like Hunger (Saqi). Both Katharine and Alice are also looking forward to studying Darija during their residency, intending to convert the Egyptian and Syrian spoken Arabic in which they are respectively fluent to the beautiful Moroccan autochthonous language.
