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list price: $12.99
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
category: Fiction
published: Oct 2024
ISBN:9781774151754
publisher: Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.

Farida

by Monia Mazigh, translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott

tagged: literary, contemporary women
Description

Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.

Farida, a young woman in Tunis, is passionate about reading and loves the French language. But she is compelled to marry Kamel, a brute of a man, who drinks, keeps mistresses, and beats her when she talks back. But she is defiant, and takes comfort from her secret reading. The country is a French colony and male-dominated. Finally after ten years she is granted a divorce by the courts and lives with her son Tewfiq. A smoking, independent-minded divorcee, she sees the country attain its freedom from the French and its arrival into modern times; the growth of her son into a young public servant; and her granddaughter Leila mature into an independent, educated young woman. This is a novel of modern Tunisia told through the lives of its women.

About the Authors
Monia Mazigh holds a Ph.D. in finance from McGill University. In 2009, she published her memoir, Hope and Despair, about her fight to free her husband, Maher Arar, from a Syrian jail. Her debut novel, Miroirs et mirages, published originally in French, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award.

Phyllis Aronoff, a Montrealer born and bred, translates from French to English, solo or with co-translator Howard Scott. She has translated fiction, poetry, memoirs, and works in the humanities by authors from Québec and France. Among her recent translations are Message Sticks / Tshissinuatshitakana, poems by Innu writer Joséphine Bacon, and novels (co-translated with Howard Scott) by Rima Elkouri and Edem Awumey. Her translations have won several prizes, including the Jewish Book Award for Fiction and, with Howard Scott, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. Phyllis is a past president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and has represented translators on the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada.

Howard Scott is a Montreal literary translator who works with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His translations include works by Madeleine Gagnon, science-fiction writer Élisabeth Vonarburg, and Canada’s Poet Laureate, Michel Pleau. Scott received the Governor General’s Literary Award for his translation of Louky Bersianik’s The Euguelion. The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701, by Gilles Havard, which he co-translated with Phyllis Aronoff, won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Award. A Slight Case of Fatigue, by Stéphane Bourguignon, another co-translation with Phyllis Aronoff, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Howard Scott is a past president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada.
Contributor Notes

Monia Mazigh is the author of two memoirs, three novels, and a collection of short stories. She has written for ONFr+, Radio-Canada, the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star and contributes regularly to Islamic Horizons. Her memoir, Gendered Islamophobia: My Journey with a Scar(f) was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2023. Farida won the Ottawa Book Award for French fiction. Monia Mazigh is an adjunct and research professor at the Department of English and Literature, Carleton University (Ottawa).

Editorial Review

"Intimate in style, each chapter bringing out the inner voice of a character, this novel takes us into a bubble containing the lives of three generations of Tunisians. A series of characters appear, representing the evolution of this land of jasmines and the real but difficult emancipation of its women." --Yvan Cliche, Nuit Blanche Magazine

"Monia Mazigh's fluid, elegant writing holds our attention throughout the individual and collective journeys it presents and the social and political transformations that have taken place in Tunisia and Canada." --Jury of the Ottawa Book Award, French Fiction, 2021

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