ABSTRACT
Hassan Blasim has been critically acclaimed as one of the most important contemporary authors in Arabic. Blasim’s story as an internationally renowned author began in 2009 with the first translation of a collection of his stories into English, The Madman of Freedom Square. The actual breakthrough for him was winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, the British literary award for literature in translation, for his second book in English, The Iraqi Christ. In this chapter, Olli Löytty explores the multilingual routes that Blasim’s texts have taken in the global literary field and the mechanisms that regulate their circulation across national borders. Through interviews with Blasim himself, as well as his publishers, Löytty shows how the English translation acted as a bridge between the original Arabic and translations in other languages than English and how translations of Blasim’s texts have the potential to dismantle the hierarchies between languages.
