Read the World A to Z Launch Celebration, BKBF Bookend Event

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2026 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

Travel the globe with the most influential voices from Argentina to Zambia!

Translation press World Editions partners with Rabbit Books and Bar and Brooklyn Book Festival to launch Read the World A to Z, a series of 26 translated novels, one country for every letter of the alphabet -- the first three from Argentina, Belgium and China.

Celebrate with award-winning authors Kit Fan and Jeremy Tiang and translators Samantha Schnee, Zia Ahmed, Will Morningstar, Alta L Price, Sean Gasper Bye and Michelle Mirabella. plus international specialty drinks and snacks!

Meet the world-famous authors and translators who are part of the Read the World A to Z series and hear about their work in championing world literature.

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. He was born and educated in Hong Kong and now lives in the UK, where He has written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice-Chair of Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and Co-Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency(CLA). He is the author of the novels Diamond Hill and Goodbye Chinatown, both published by World Editions.

Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English literary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante's debut novel, The Cracks We Bear, her work appears in the anthologies Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, and Southwest Review..

Jeremy Tiang won the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency, and was shortlisted for the same prize for his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day. He has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including Zhang Yueran's Cocoon for World Editions, which won the Singapore Literature Prize. He also writes and translates plays -- most recently Salesman之死, which was staged at New York's Connelly Theater and received an Obie Award. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City.

Will Morningstar is a book editor and translator whose work is featured in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology and has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, ANMLY, Two Lines, Latin American Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and the Massachusetts Review.

Zia Ahmed translates Arabic fiction and literary nonfiction. His translations include The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman (Syracuse University Press), Pool of Desires (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming), and Things Are Not in Their Place (World Editions, forthcoming). He lives in Virginia.

ALTA L. PRICE, recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, she translates from Italian and German into English. Price’s translation of Juli Zeh’s novel New Year, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize as well as the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize.

SEAN GASPER BYE's translations of Polish literature have been awarded the EBRD Literature Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize. He has been a Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, and Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He lives in Philadelphia and currently serves as the Interim Executive Director at the American Literary Translators Association.

Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders, which has published 4,400 writers from 139 countries since the online magazine launched in 2003. As a translator from Spanish, she is the recipient of a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate eminent Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s novel El complot de los románticos.