Dan Nunn is Editorial Manager at Garnet Publishing and Ithaca Press, an independent publishing company that specialises in publications on the Arab world. Following an intensive visit to the Cairo International Book Fair in 2007 he shares his experience successes.

Have Garnet Publishing and Ithaca Press always specialised in the Arab world?
Yes, Garnet was formed in the early 1990s and is Lebanese owned, so the Arab world has always been a key focus of our books. Our academic imprint, Ithaca Press, actually dates all the way back to the 1970s and has been publishing quality books on the Middle East since before I was born, which is quite sobering! Garnet also publishes the ‘Great Books of Islamic Civilisation' series, which is gradually making classical works of Arabic literature available in English, so they can be appreciated by a much wider audience.

You were a member of the UK delegation to the Cairo International Book Fair in 2007. What benefits did you get out of this trip?
The trip provided a fascinating insight into the publishing scene in Cairo – something I had no previous experience of. It was particularly interesting to learn about some of the challenges Arab publishers face in their own market – I think we have it fairly easy by comparison! Also, I had been planning to try to launch a new series of translated Arab fiction for a couple of months, but hadn’t really inherited any appropriate contacts from my predecessors – so the opportunity to meet with Arab publishers at the Cairo Book Fair was too good an opportunity to miss.

Have you done any business with the Arab world since then?
A little – although not as much as I would have liked. We sold rights to a book about Egyptian theatre in the nineteenth century to AUC Press and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage is publishing an Arabic translation of a book about dhow sailing in the Gulf. Our sister company, All Prints, in Beirut has also just published an Arabic edition of our cookery book, ‘Simply Lebanese’.

You studied Arabic at university. That must have helped you both in making contacts and in selecting books for translation?
I think it helped because it was obvious I was genuinely interested, but sadly these days my Arabic has deteriorated to the extent that I would struggle to read a book in the original Arabic – or at least it would probably take me a couple of years to finish it!

During 2008 you are publishing three books newly translated from Arabic. What challenges did you face in the process of selecting, translating and publishing the books?
Because so little has been translated from Arabic to English the biggest problem was finding out enough about authors and their writing to be able to make a decision. I was fortunate in that I received invaluable advice from a team of academics specialising in Arab literature, who made recommendations about authors I should be looking at. Each of the authors of these first three books has also already had work translated into English, so I was able to read and appreciate their work from the offset – although in future I hope to be able to also include authors who have not already been translated. The three writers are all very different. Zakaria Tamer (author of Breaking Knees) is widely recognized as one of the leading writers of the Arabic short story – a genre that is much more popular in the Arab world than in the ‘West’. Ibrahim Al-Koni (author of Seven Veils of Seth) is a prolific novelist whose writing is inspired by the desert. Miral al-Tahawy (author of Gazelle Tracks) is a young Egyptian writer whose novels provide rare insight into the lives of Bedouin women in Egypt.

Do you think the market for books translated from Arabic is small and specialised or is there interest from the general public?
I think realistically the market is fairly small, although I hope that current world events will mean that there is also a more general interest from the wider public. Certainly the books from Garnet’s earlier Arab Women Writer’s series – one of which, The Eye of the Mirror by Palestinian writer Liana Badr, is being republished alongside these three new books – did quite well! Perhaps you should ask me again in a year’s time

What next? Do you have more translations in the pipeline?
I certainly hope so, although to a certain extent it will depend on how these books fare and whether I manage to secure funding support for future translations. It is certainly a series I feel enormously passionate about – translated fiction is a great way of exposing ‘Western’ readers to a different kind of Middle Eastern voice, one not often heard in other media such as newspapers or the TV news. Given the current international political climate, greater exposure for modern Arabic literature can only be a good thing.