In The Ardent Swarm (Amazon Crossing, 2021), his first book to be translated into English, he celebrates Tunisia’s rich oral culture, a tradition abounding in wry, often fatalistic humor.

Both a writer and an engineer, he explores the intersections of past, present, tradition, and technology, in his prose. Yamen Manai was born in 1980 in Tunis and currently lives in Paris.

This event will be moderated by PEN America’s senior director of literary programs Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf. In Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors, a family is pushed to reflect on their heritage and the demands of survival after divine intervention wrecks the sugarcane industry where they have labored for generations in Hawai’i. A Catalonian author, Nopca writes about the divided city of Barcelona, where a disillusioned generation grappling with an economic crisis moves toward secession, in the wake of underemployment and austerity. In Manai’s The Ardent Swarm, a North African beekeeper leaves isolation to seek answers in a strange city, only to be catapulted into the throes of the Arab Spring. The latest fiction by Yamen Manai, Jordi Nopca, and Kawai Strong Washburn follows characters whose lives sit on the precipice of great change as they weather the aftershocks of events initiated far and away. Whether ecological, economic, or even divine in nature, these disasters cause collisions between modernity and culture that threaten time-worn traditions.

Even in a highly connected, globalized world, some conflicts seem truly unprecedented.

The ardent swarm by yamen manai