In Translation: A Book Club
Presented by Think+DO Tank Foundation
Supported by Fairfield City Council and the Copyright Agency
About the Program
In Translation: A Book Club is a nine-month literary journey exploring how stories move between languages, cultures, and communities.
Each book in the series is read and discussed in two versions — the original language and its English translation — creating a space for multilingual readers to come together around the art of translation.
Through this program, we celebrate translation as a creative act of mediation, inviting participants to think deeply about language, storytelling, and cultural exchange.
This initiative is proudly hosted by the Think+DO Tank Foundation, which builds power, generates connections, and expands possibilities through the arts with excluded and marginalised communities.
The Book of Disappearance / سفر الإختفاء, by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon
Join us for the second series of In Translation: A Book Club, where we explore The Book of Disappearance / سفر الإختفاء, an evocative and profoundly moving novel by Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem. Read the book in either the Arabic original or in the English translation by Sinan Antoon, and join the discussion facilitated by Oula Ghannoum
Purchase the book via Lost in Books, our multilingual bookshop, or borrow a copy from our Community House. And choose your session and register today:
Session 1: Saturday 09 May 2026, 1.30-3.30 pm, Programs Room B2.10. Liverpool City Library, 52 Scott St, Liverpool.
Session 2: Saturday 16 May 2026, 1.30–3.30 pm, Think+DO Tank Foundation Community House, 2/40 Harris Street, Fairfield.
About the author
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and later to the US. She works as a senior correspondent for the Arabic newspaper, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, in New York. She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her first short story collection, City of Strangers, is forthcoming in Arabic in the summer of 2025. The Book of Disappearance has been translated into English, Italian, and German, and is forthcoming in Portuguese and Polish.
About the translator
Antoon holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he specialised in Arabic literature. He has published five novels and two poetry collections. His most recent work is Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull, 2023). His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. He is an associate professor at New York University.
Sinan Antoon on his translation: “I choose works that I find exceptionally powerful and haunting and that I feel must be shared. I read The Book of Disappearance once Ibtisam finished writing it when it was still an unpublished manuscript in Arabic. I was stunned by its beauty and told her that I wanted to translate it as soon as I had the time”.
About the facilitator
Oula Ghannoum, Professor of Plant Biology at Western Sydney University, bridges science and art. An expert on photosynthesis, she leads a multidisciplinary team addressing food security under climate change. Drawn to Sufism, Oula is a passionate poet and storyteller in Arabic and English. She co-edited a bilingual anthology on Arab Australian women migration (Don’t ask the Trees for their Names) and is working on a project weaving memory and truth telling.
About the book
Unsettling and beautifully written, The Book of Disappearance was originally published in 2014. It is built around questions such as: what if all the Palestinians in Israel disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react?
Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
The Book of Disappearance won several prizes in Arabic and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025, “Speculative and haunting, this is an exceptional exercise in memory-making and psycho-geography".
Let's explore one crucial contemporary Arabic novel. We will discuss Azem’s urgent thematic choice, the violence embedded in her speculative plot, and her mastery in the description of places and people, as well as some of the translation choices made by Antoon.
Previous sessions of In Translation: A Book Club in other languages
Join the Spanish Edition
Temporada de huracanes / Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Join us for the first session of In Translation: A Book Club, where we explore Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season), a powerful and unforgettable novel by Mexican author Fernanda Melchor (1982) and its English translation by Sophie Hughes.
Both sessions to be facilitated by Rosario Lázaro Igoa.
Limited capacity to 20 people each session
Choose your location and register today
Session 1: Saturday 15 November 2025, 3–5 pm
Think+DO Tank Foundation Community House, 2/40 Harris Street, Fairfield
Session 2: Saturday 6 December 2025, 3–5 pm
Pauline McLeod Room, Marrickville Library, 313–319 Marrickville Road
Purchase Books
How to Join In Translation: A Book Club
To take part in our multilingual reading journey, simply:
Register using the online form below.
Select which book club sessions you’d like to join — Spanish, Arabic, or Indonesian - see registration for more information on dates.
Purchase your book through Lost in Books, our multilingual bookshop.
Have questions? Speak with our friendly team — we’re here to help!
Temporada de huracanes / Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, among other prizes, Temporada de huracanes/ Hurricane Season was inspired by a real event of the murder of a woman in rural Mexico. The Witch is dead. After a group of children discover her decomposing corpse, the village is rife with rumors and suspicions about the murder of this feared and respected woman, who had carried out the community’s ritual shamanic customs. In dazzling, visceral language, Melchor extracts humanity from otherwise irredeemably brutal characters, and spins a terrifying and heartrending tale of dark suspense in a Mexican village that seems damned.
Let's explore one of the most memorable novels in recent Latin American literature. We will discuss Melchor’s remarkable use of language and exploration of provocative themes, as well as some of the translation choices made by Hughes.
“‘Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story—its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor’s prose. Instead of supplying a welcome breeze in the heat, the local river is where the children find the Witch’s body. Sophie Hughes’s translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang impressively.’,”
credit: Maja Lindströem
About the Author
Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices. She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season, which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her most recent novel, Paradais, was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This Is Not Miami is a collection of narrative non-fiction pieces. Melchor’s books are published in thirty-four territories. She lives in Mexico.
credit: Harry Zundel
About the translator
Born in Surrey, Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian. She is the translator of more than 20 novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Enrique Vila-Matas. Hughes has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. Her translations have been longlisted or shortlisted for the International Booker Prize five times, most recently her translation of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (shortlisted in 2025). Sophie Hughes lives in Trieste.
credit Helen Guliana
About the facilitator
Rosario Lazaro Igoa is a Uruguayan writer, literary translator, and researcher. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies (UFSC, Brazil) and has lectured in literary translation. From Portuguese and English into Spanish, Rosario has translated Mário de Andrade, Danielle McLaughlin, Gerald Murnane, Edmund De Waal, and Dalton Trevisan, among other authors. She has published the short story collections Peces mudos, and Cráteres artificiales, as well as the collection of essays Hasta el sol y todas las ciudades en el medio.
“‘A formidable and mighty novel, a masterpiece of Mexican literature.‘, ”
“‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.’, ”