An Evening with Hamid Ismailov

Hosted in partnership with Northwest Translators & Interpreters Society (NOTIS).

Syracuse University Press is offering a 40% discount on orders of Gaia, Queen of Ants in honor of Hamid's US tour. Use the code 05GQOA22 at checkout to redeem, valid until June 30.

Folio and NOTIS are pleased to invite you to join us for a unique in-person evening with award-winning Uzbek novelist, journalist and poet Hamid Ismailov, in conversation with Northwest translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega. 

The pair will dive into Ismailov's career as a novelist and a journalist, life as an author in exile, his experience as a writer whose books are better known in translation and how the prospect of translation affects his choices as a novelist. The evening will conclude with a multilingual reading from one of his recent novels and a wine reception with the author.

Ismailov's novel The Railway, originally written before he left Uzbekistan, was the first to be translated into English. His latest novel, MANASCHI, is the third and final book in Ismailov's informal Central Asia trilogy.

Hamid Ismailov was born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of Mullahs and Khodjas living in Kyrgyzstan, many of whom had lost their lives during the Stalin era persecution. Though he could have become a high-flying Soviet or post-Soviet apparatchik, instead his fate led him to become a dissident writer and poet residing in the West. He was the BBC World Service first Writer in Residence. Critics have compared his books to the best of Russian classics, Sufi parables and works of Western post-modernism. While his writing reflects all of these and many other strands, it is his unique intercultural experience that excites and draws the reader into his world. Ismailov is the author of nearly a dozen novels translated into multiple languages. His historical novel “The Devils’ Dance” won the EBRD Literature Prize in 2019. His latest novel, Manaschi, came out this year with Tilted Axis Press.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega lives in Seattle, Washington and has translated, to date, 2.5 of Hamid Ismailov’s novels from Russian and Uzbek into English. Other translations of hers have been published in World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, The Critical Flame, poetry and short-story anthologies, and more. Shelley is a past president of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society.