16 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Though Booth is a well-known translator, she says she wasn’t
having any luck getting the book published until, at an event
at Oxford, she met Wylie U.K. agent Charles Buchan and told
him about it.
The 2019 Man Booker International Prize–winning
book Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, translated
by Marilyn Booth, is a tale of firsts and serendipity.
The first novel originally written in Arabic to win
the Booker international prize (an
award of £50,000 shared between author and
translator) and the first book by an Omani woman
to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies came
to be published in English through a series of rela-
tionships and chance meetings.
Booth, a translator and Oxford University pro-
fessor, says she first met Alharthi in 2010 at the
University of Edinburgh, where Alharthi was
completing her PhD in classical Arabic poetry. On
a subsequent visit to Edinburgh, Alharthi gave
Booth the novel she had published in Beirut. “I
liked it,” Booth says, “and while I didn’t have a
commission, I just wanted to translate it, which
I’ve done before with other books.”
Alharthi recalls that even while she was
studying literature, she wanted to write and had
started the novel. “I have said sometimes that I
began Celestial Bodies because while I was in
Scotland for my PhD, I was homesick and remem-
bering Oman,” she says. “And also the pace of
change: Oman has changed rapidly, and it is what
happens when things change that the novel
considers.”
The book begins with three sisters in an Omani
village and traces the family—as Booth writes
in her translator’s introduction—“over three
generations, shaped by the rapid social changes
and consequent shifts in outlook that Oman’s
populace have experienced across the twentieth
century.” Seen though the lens of Asma, Khawla,
and Mayya’s diverse reactions to the status quo,
tradition is challenged in relationships between
men and women, master and slave (slavery was
only abolished in Oman in 1970), parents and
children, and a shift from rural to city living, all
of which reflect the upheaval in the country’s
history.A Book of Firsts
Jokha Alharthi’s novel, winner of the 2019 Man Booker
International Prize, tells the story of three Omani sisters
against the backdrop of a changing society
Column|OPEN BOOK
Louisa Ermelino