Join us Thursday, September 28th at Community Bookstore to hear Donald Nicholson-Smith and Christopher Winks discuss Abdellatif Laâbi and Victor Serge and examine these writers’ enduring influence and ability to keep writing under repressive regimes. In Praise of Defeat, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, is the first English-language collection of Abdellatif Laâbi‘s poetry, spanning six decades of political and literary change, innovation, and struggle from one of the central writers and thinkers in contemporary Maghreb letters. The Russian Victor Serge’s A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems (trans. James Brook) bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals and the advent of totalitarian rule.

Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and freelance editor living in New York City. His translations include Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Three to Kill, Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale, and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, among many more.

Christopher Winks is a scholar of comparative modernisms, and the author Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature. He has published numerous articles, reviews and translations and is the editor and co-translator of Los Danzantes del Tiempo, a bilingual English-Spanish anthology of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry.