Of Loss and Lavender

Notes from Another Country
 

A book talk with Sinan Antoon

Moderated by Khaled Al-Hilli and Bassam Haddad

Tuesday, 28 April 2026 at 1 PM EST

Join us for a book talk with Sinan Antoon, discussing his latest novel, Of Loss and Lavender, which he translated into English [Khuzama]. Khuzama was originally published in Arabic by Manshurat al-Jamal in 2023. It has appeared in French and Persian, and now in English, translated by Sinan Antoon. The novel was released in the US last month as Of Loss and Lavender from Other Press, and in the UK, from Saqi Books under the title Notes from a Lost Country. 

Featuring

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and a forthcoming book on the Iraqi poet, Sargon Boulus. His essays in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world. He writes a bi-weekly column for the London-based, pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Araby. His writings in English have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, and World Literature Today. Antoon has published two collections of poetry in Arabic and two in English, most recently, Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull Books, 2023). He has published five novels in Arabic. Translations have appeared in sixteen languages. His own translation of his second novel, Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (Beirut, 2010) into English as The Corpse Washer for Yale University Press in 2013 was recognized with a 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translation, was longlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for best translated fiction, and won the 2013 Arab American Book Prize. His translations from the Arabic include Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago, 2011) which won the 2012 American Literary Translators Association and Ibtisam Azem's novel, The Book of Disappearance, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025. Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct About Baghdad, a documentary about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and associate professor at New York University. 

Khaled al-Hilli is a translator and scholar of contemporary Arabic literature and language. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a Clinical Professor at New York University. His research focuses on contemporary Iraqi and Arabic fiction, language pedagogy, Arabic poetics, and critical approaches to knowledge production in Arabic. Before joining NYU, he taught at Hunter College, CUNY. He is the co-translator of a poetry collection by Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, no. 64, 2025), and the editor and translator of The Great River—Translating the Beats into Arabic (Lost & Found, Series IX, 2024), tracing the literary encounters of Sargon Boulus (1944–2007) across Iraq, Lebanon, and the United States.

Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).