By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories' politics of meaning-making.

The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women's story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women's literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories' geopolitical scope.

This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women's literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.

Ruth Abou Rached is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Southampton and specialises in teaching Translation Studies, Modern Foreign Languages and Arabic studies to widen university access to under-represented groups. Her work on Iraqi women's literature was inspired by community work in the UK and living in the Middle East. Her research interests include Iraqi and Arab women's writing, Palestinian and other exilic literatures, postcolonial literary studies and intersectional feminist translation theories. She is editor for New Voices in Translation Studies, International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS).

Chapter 1: Pathways of Iraqi women's story-writing in English translation

Chapter 2: Translating 'the Uncanny'- Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir

• The 'Uncanny' and [al-ightirab] as home, exile and 'normality' in Iraqi literature
• Samira Al-Mana & [The Umbilical Cord] (1990): recovering lost stories
• Daizy Al-Amir: [On The Waiting List] (1988): an uncanny staging

• [The American Granddaughter]: critical contexts
• [The American Granddaughter] (2009) 'doubled' in translation
• A comparative reading: the politics of gender (dis/re) location in re/translation
• (Re)locating different women's voices in Arabic and English para/translation
• Conclusion: a paradigm of aural feminist translation

• ! [A Sky So Close!]: critical contexts
• Reading Iraqi women writing 'solidarity among the subaltern' across languages
• Interactions as conversations: para/translating Iraqi rurality
• Cross-language representations of Iraqi alterity and solidarity

Chapter 5: Re/writing confrontations in translation: Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein

• Beyond gendered binaries of violence: reading Iraqi women's literature of war and conflict
• [Mothballs] by Alia Mamdouh: critical contexts
• Mothballs and Naphtalene: confronting gendered un/translatabilities and conflict
• [Beyond Love] (2003): critical contexts
• Para/translating confrontations of war: au/their/ing Iraqi solidarity across languages