Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated by Marilyn Booth―translator of the 2019 International Booker Prize-winning Celestial Bodies―is a darkly humorous and powerful novel that captures war through Kamiran, a 13-year-old Kurdish boy. Fleeing Afrin with his family, Kamiran undergoes a surreal transformation―his body turning to chalk, a haunting symbol of identity erased by conflict. Blending sharp wit with deep sorrow, the novel explores trauma, displacement, and resilience.
Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan.
Jan Dost has published five novels in Kurdish and eleven in Arabic (as well as four volumes of poetry). Translations of his fiction have appeared in Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Polish, Persian, and Italian. Almost all of his Arabic novels have appeared in Kurdish and vice versa. His Kurdish novel Mirnåme (2008), for instance, appeared in Turkish, and Persian; the Arabic novel ‘Ashiq al-mutarjim (2013) has appeared in Italian, Kurdish, and Turkish; the Arabic novel Bas akhdar yughadir Halab (2019) has been translated into Spanish and Kurdish. Safe Corridor is his first novel to appear in English.
Jan Dost has received numerous awards: in Syria (Short Story Prize, 1992); in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Hussein Arif Award for Creativity, 2014; Mem u Zin Literature Festival Award, 2021); in Germany (Kurdish Poetry Prize, 2012); and in Austria (Sharafnama Award for Kurdish Culture, 2021). He has also translated literary works from Kurdish and Persian into Arabic, and from Arabic into Kurdish, and has participated in translation workshops as well as speaking at conferences and book fairs. Since 2000, Jan Dost has resided in Germany and is a German citizen. His most recent work in Arabic is al-Asir al-faransawi (2022).
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. At Oxford, she held the endowed Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professorship for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, 2015-23; at Edinburgh, she held the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2009-15. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2021). She has in recent years been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; l’Institut d’études avancées, Paris; Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture, University of Chicago; and visiting professor, l’EHESS, in addition to numerous earlier research fellowships.
Safe Corridor is the twenty-first volume of Arabic fiction that Booth has rendered into English. Other recent translations include Omani author Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger; Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s Silken Gazelles; and Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost. Her translation of Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. In addition to other novels by Alharthi and Barakat, her translations include novels by Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Alia Mamdouh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Latifa al-Zayyat, Somaya Ramadan, and others, as well as a memoir by Nawal al-Saadawi and three short story collections. Her first venture into translating nineteenth-century fiction, Alis al-Bustani’s 1891 novel Sa’iba is forthcoming with Oxford World’s Classics.
