Join us for a poetry reading with Ghayath Almadhoun غياث المدهون, presented in conjunction with ALTA49.
Almadhoun's I Have Brought You a Severed Hand, translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books, was longlisted for the 2026 National Translation Award in Poetry. The shortlist will be announced October 6, with winners named October 23 at an awards ceremony during ALTA's annual conference.
“I am a free man, from an unfree country. I write love poems in the form of nightmares”
In a phalanx of notes and footnotes, A Severed Hand destabilizes the very hierarchies of the page, and in so doing transgresses the borders of the poem, the nation, the body, and even that zone between speaker and addressee. Written over the years 2017 to 2023, the poet takes us to Palestine, Syria, Germany and Sweden, reasserting the stakes for those unable to leave their states of imprisonment while proposing that hope may be inseparable from the absurdity of violence. He writes: “You say that I survived the war. No, my dear, nobody survives wars. It’s only that I didn’t die. I just stayed alive.”
“Ghayath Almadhoun has found a lyrical language that is appropriate to the Syrian civil war. He is the great poet of a great catastrophe.”
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“For a murdered person there is no resurrection except in poetry; for a murdered poem, there is no resurrection except in reading.”
- Bookforum
“Almadhoun subverts lyricism and turns metaphor on its head to expose, transform, self-indict, confront.”
- Poetry Foundation
“Formally experimentally and emotionally explosive.”
– Asymptote
“Almadhoun caught me with his first line.”
– Jenny Holzer
Ghayath Almadhoun غياث المدهون is a Palestinian poet, born in Damascus in 1979. In 2008 he moved to Sweden. He has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic, most recently I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2024), and his poems have been translated into more than thirty languages. He also makes poetry films, such as Évian, which won the Zebra Award for Best Poetry Film in 2020. Almadhoun has collaborated with several poets and artists, including US artist Jenny Holzer and German musician Blixa Bargeld. His collection Adrenalin (translated into English by Catherine Cobham) was published by Action Books in the US in 2017. Almadhoun was recently awarded a one-year residency in the DAAD Artists-in- Berlin program and now divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.
Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).