Celestial Bodies

"Yes, Celestial Bodies is a story of Oman, of worlds moving from a slave culture to a culture of skyscrapers. It focuses in on the story of three sisters and the way they each tangle (or not) with love. One of the things we loved about it is that it just was beautifully pieced together as a narrative and as an experience—almost like a kind of jigsaw puzzle or a mosaic, rather than as something more traditionally linear. And we thought it was really vital to, in a sense, lift the veil on a world that we don’t often hear about. It has a great energy to it because it comes from a time when both globally and locally there’s a shift. There’s an old world order that’s beginning to collapse, and a new world order that’s arriving. And it has a beautiful, poetic translation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We’ve got to remember that this is a prize for the translators as well as for the authors. It’s a really, really beautiful, translation. And it’s a light touch on a very complicated history. Lots of lines in it that are immediately memorable. There’s one which is one of the characters says: “We get to know ourselves better in new, strange places.” And that felt like a kind of beautiful maxim for the prize itself. Yes. I really hope that these books all become bestsellers as a result of being shortlisted. Absolutely. And, yeah, that’s right. Hopefully it will do both: both help those smaller presses, and also stimulate the larger publishing houses to realise the popularity and value of translated fiction."