Shahzoda Samarqandi and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega — 'Mothersland'

Third Place Books is thrilled to welcome Shahzoda Samarqandi and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega to our Ravenna store for a discussion of Mothersland. This event is free and open to the public.

Copies of Mothersland will be available for purchase in store at the event.

"In Mothersland, Shahzoda Samarqandi, the award-winning Tajik activist, poet and novelist from Uzbekistan, subverts a deeply-rooted metaphorical system in Persian literary culture: the land as woman. A socially entrenched metaphor that has framed conquest as male and the conquered as female becomes upended in Samarqandi's lyrical and powerful account of life at a moment of ecological and imperial collapse. One of the first climate novels composed in Tajik Persian, Mothersland is now available in Shelley Fairweather-Vega's bright and engaging English translation. Shahzoda Samarqandi is a crucial voice in our world today!"
—Aria Fani, assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington

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This event is free to attend. For important updates, registration is highly recommended in advance.

This haunting novel by the world's leading Tajik-language novelist is a time-twisting reverie on the bond between mothers and daughters. Growing up in late Soviet-era Uzbekistan, Mahtab feels more at home in the cotton field-and in the past, as depicted in her mother's diary-than at school, where the books in the library are rewritten with every new political trend. When a Russian film crew comes to town to make a movie about cotton, starring Mahtab in the role of her hero-worker mother, Mahtab suffers an accident that scrambles her memory. As she struggles to recover, she must untangle her mother's story from her own, and navigate the hazy contours of memory, love, storytelling, and country to finally find herself.

Shahzoda Samarqandi was born in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. Her taboo-breaking novels have brought her international recognition. After working for Tajik-language newspapers and television as well as the BBC Persian service, Samarqandi moved to the Netherlands where she served as an editor for Central Asia and Afghanistan at Radio Zamaneh, and she has worked to protect female activists and journalists in Afghanistan.
Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a full-time literary translator in Seattle, Washington, focusing on prose and poetry by today’s best Central Asian writers. She is currently the administrator of the Literary Division of the American Translators Association and runs Seattle's own Northwest Literary Translators.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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