Banipal

Banipal was an independent literary magazine based in London that promoted contemporary literature from the Arab world through translation into English. Founded in 1998 by Margaret Obank and the Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, it was published three times a year for twenty-five years, producing seventy-five issues before its editors announced the final edition in December 2022. In that quarter century Banipal became the principal English-language window on modern Arab writing, publishing poems, short stories and novel extracts by established and emerging Arab authors, many of them translated into English for the first time, together with author interviews, profiles and book reviews. It also co-sponsored a major translation prize and won international awards of its own. This profile is written in the past tense, because the magazine itself ceased publication with its seventy-fifth issue.

Founding in London in 1998

Banipal was founded in London in 1998 by Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon, and it took its place quickly among the small number of magazines anywhere dedicated to a single literature in translation. From the first issue, the editors set out three guiding principles, which they described as the magazine's cornerstones: that Arab literature is an essential part of world culture and human civilisation; that dialogue between different cultures needs to be continually deepened; and that the pleasure and enlightenment of reading fine poetry and imaginative writing are integral to human existence. Those principles guided the magazine's choices for its whole life. Banipal was published three times a year, appeared in English, carried the ISSN 1461-5363, and built its reputation issue by issue without the backing of a large publisher or a state cultural ministry, a point its admirers frequently made.

Samuel Shimon: The Co-Founder's Story

The magazine's co-founder and driving editorial presence, Samuel Shimon, was born in 1956 into a poor Assyrian family in Iraq. He left his country in 1979 intending to become a film-maker in Hollywood, travelling through Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis, and in 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. There his small press, Editions Gilgamesh, published volumes of poetry and fiction by Arab authors, including two collections of his own. He moved to London in 1996 and worked as a journalist, and in 1998 his passion for literature led him to co-found Banipal with Margaret Obank. A 2003 profile in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called him a tireless missionary for literary matters. His autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris, published in Arabic in 2005, became a continuing bestseller described as a manifesto of tolerance, and he went on to edit projects including Beirut39, an anthology of new writing from the Arab world, in 2010, and the short story collection Baghdad Noir in 2018. In 2002 he founded the Arabic literary website kikah.com, which he edited for a number of years.

What Banipal Published

Each of Banipal's three issues a year presented established and new Arab authors and poets in English, many for the first time, through poems, short stories and excerpts from novels, supplemented by author interviews, profiles and book reviews. Issues were well illustrated with author photographs, and their full-colour covers featured prominent Arab artists, making the artists of the Arab world part of the magazine's presentation as well as its writers. Issues usually focused on a specific theme or territory: recent editions were devoted to subjects including Libyan fiction, Arab American authors, Iraqi authors, literature in Yemen today and writing in Dutch. That thematic structure let a reader approach an unfamiliar national literature whole, rather than meeting its writers one at a time, and it made Banipal a reference shelf for publishers, academics and translators scouting new work. The magazine addressed itself to lovers of world literature and worked to widen the readership for Arab writers for their own sake, valuing both the particularity and the universality of their voices.

Arab Literature, Not Just Arabic Literature

One of Banipal's most considered editorial decisions was in its title and scope: it presented the literature of the Arab world and named it Arab rather than Arabic literature. The distinction mattered, because Arabic literature as a label excludes literature by Arab authors not written in Arabic, and with it many significant Arab writers. Banipal therefore published Arab writers and poets who wrote in French, English or German as well as those who wrote in the main Arabic language, presenting the reality of literature from the Arab world as its writers actually lived and produced it, across the diaspora as well as in the region itself. That inclusive definition shaped its themed issues, such as those on Arab American authors and on writing in Dutch, and it is one reason the magazine was taken seriously by the writers it published: it did not require them to fit a narrower linguistic test before it would translate, print and champion them.

The Saif Ghobash–Banipal Translation Prize

Banipal's influence extended beyond its own pages through the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, which the magazine co-sponsored. The prize rewarded published English translations of Arabic literary works and gave translators, whose labour is often invisible, a named honour attached to the best-known brand in the field. For a magazine whose founding logic held that the moment a reader begins a translation, a dialogue between cultures begins, sponsoring a translation prize was a natural extension of the editorial mission into the economics of publishing: it encouraged publishers to commission translations, translators to undertake difficult books, and readers and reviewers to treat the translator's work as part of a book's achievement. The prize long outlasted individual issues in its effect on how Arabic literature reached English-language bookshops.

Praise From Writers and Critics

Few small magazines were praised as warmly, by Arab and non-Arab commentators alike, as Banipal was. The Egyptian novelist Gamal el-Ghitani, the poet James Kirkup and the writer Anton Shammas were among those who commended its role in spreading Arabic literature to a wider audience. The Iraqi poet, novelist and translator Fadhil Al Azzawi judged that what Banipal had achieved for Arab literature and culture in its first twenty-one issues outweighed the work of all the Arab ministries of culture combined, and that it had enabled English readers to discover the real craft of modern Arab literature; he called Margaret Obank the Arabs' one real minister for culture. Bill Swainson, a former editor at Bloomsbury, Oneworld and MacLehose Press, later summed up the trade view: Banipal had provided an English window on the Arab world without which the West would have known very little, and its editors had advised publishers and editors working with Arab writers for twenty-five years.

Awards and the Spanish Edition

Banipal's own recognition culminated in 2020, when the magazine won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Publishing and Technology category, an honour carrying a purse of 750,000 United Arab Emirates dirhams, then worth about 204,000 United States dollars. Obank and Shimon used the prize money to start a Spanish edition of Banipal, launched in 2020 with Shimon as its editor-in-chief, extending the magazine's model of presenting contemporary Arab authors in translation to Spanish-language readers. The award citation described the magazine as a vehicle for intercultural dialogue and exchange, opening a window for British and other Western audiences on the realities of Arab culture in all its diversity and vibrancy. The Spanish venture underlined that Banipal's founders saw their project as a method, not just a magazine: the same editorial approach could be rebuilt in any language whose readers lacked access to modern Arab writing.

The Final Issue and Closure in 2022

As of December 2022, seventy-five issues of Banipal had been published, and with that landmark the editors announced the final edition, closing the magazine after twenty-five years. At a celebratory closing party in London in January 2023, reported by Publishing Perspectives, Obank and Shimon explained that the time was right for a younger generation to take the magazine forward, though no successor had then emerged. Shimon said they had been offered money to continue themselves, but that the question was energy rather than money, and that he wanted to return to writing his novels. Speakers at the event credited the magazine with internationalising Arab literature; Wen-chin Ouyang, professor of Arabic and contemporary literature at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, praised its internship programme for training a new generation of Arabists, and Eve Smith of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction joined the tributes to its founders.

Banipal's Legacy

Banipal's legacy is unusually concrete for a literary magazine. Seventy-five themed issues introduced hundreds of Arab poets and fiction writers to English, many for the first time, and demonstrated to commercial publishers that a readership for Arab literature in translation existed and could be grown. Its translation prize raised the status of translators, its Spanish edition carried the model into another language, and its internships and editorial advice shaped a generation of Arabists, editors and publishers. Writers across the Arab world treated an appearance in Banipal as a first step into English, and readers treated its covers, featuring prominent Arab artists, as a reliable signpost through an unfamiliar literature. The magazine was published from London, in England, between 1998 and 2022, and its back issues remain a record of a quarter century of modern Arab writing. Its official website was banipal.co.uk.