The Apartment in Bab El-Louk: Elisabeth Jaquette and Ganzeer
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, California
Donia Maher′s award-winning graphic novel ″The Apartment in Bab El Louk″, featuring the combined talents of prominent Egyptian artist Ganzeer, political cartoonist Ahmed Nady and gifted translator Elisabeth Jaquette is a collaborative tour-de-force. Ganzeer, Elisabeth Jaquette, and Edward Gauvin will discuss this “”fabulous noir poem” that has been simply described as “the reflections of an old recluse in busy downtown Cairo neighbourhood of Bab El-Louk.”
This event is supported in part by grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and from San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was shortlisted for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Syrian author Dima Wannous. Elisabeth’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, The Common, and World Literature Today, as well as a dozen anthologies. Formerly, she was Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.
Ganzeer, a graphic designer since 2005, has been involved in contemporary art since 2007 with a variety of exhibitions between Cairo, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy, Brazil, USA, Emirates, and Amman. He has become most known outside of the typical art sphere for his street art and activism efforts throughout 2011. The Guardian of London has described Ganzeer as a major player in an emerging “counter-culture art scene on the mainstream radar,” and Al-Monitor.com has placed him on a list of fifty people shaping the culture of the Middle East today. Art In America‘s C. Viveros-Faune has associated Ganzeer with today’s “New Realism,” a label attributed to an art-form responding to a host of global challenges connected to the majority of people outside the standard art bubble.
Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today. The translator of eight works of prose fiction and over 300 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. He is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow for his work on Pierre Bettencourt, whom he has written about at Weird Fiction Review.