All Walls Collapse

Overview

The history of walls—as a way to keep people in or out—is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico–US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people’s lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.

Reviews

‘Powerful, truthful and deeply moving – stories woven with courage and resilience.’ —Elif Shafak

‘A jewel of a book... All Walls Collapse is the antidote we need to the poison of anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia that has entered the national mainstream. This is translation as an act of public intervention.’ —Meena Kandasamy

Author Biography

Geetanjali Shree was born in Mainpuri, India, in 1957. She is the author of three novels and several story collections, and her work has been translated into English, French, German, Serbian and Korean. Her work has received a number of awards, including the 2022 International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis, 2021), translated by Daisy Rockwell. Shree currently lives in New Dehli. Krisztina Tóth is one of Hungary’s most highly acclaimed poets and writers. She has published many volumes of poetry, several collections of short stories and children’s books, and a novel, Aquarium, which was shortlisted for the German Internationaler Literaturpreis in 2015. Her short story collection Pixel, translated by Owen Good, was published in English by Seagull Books. Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and many others, including France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Shin is the author of multiple books, including The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, I’ll Be Right There, The Court Dancer, Violets, and the New York Times-bestselling Please Look After Mom, which has been published in over forty countries. Paulo Scott was born in 1966 in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood. At university, he was an active member of the student political movement and was also involved in Brazil’s re-democratisation process. For fourteen years he taught law at university in Porto Alegre. He has now published six books of fiction and seven of poetry, as well as one graphic novel. He has lived in London, Rio de Janeiro and Garopaba, and moved to São Paulo in 2019 to focus on writing full-time. Zahra El Hasnaoui Ahmed was born in Aaiún, the old capital of Spanish Sahara. She studied languages in Madrid and London and works as a teacher. She is a member of the Saharawi Friendship Generation and author of The Silence of the Clouds. Constantia Soteriou has written three novels. Aishe Goes on Vacation and Voices Made of Soil were shortlisted for the Greek and Cypriot National Book Awards. Her short story, ‘Death Customs’, translated into English by Lina Protopapa, was the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Bitter Country, her most recent book, revolves around the final moments of the mother of an eighteen-year-old man who went missing in the 1974 coup d’état. Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He has written articles for many international publications, short stories and six novels, including Down the Rabbit Hole, which was translated into twenty languages and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Quesadillas, I’ll Sell You a Dog, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me and The Invasion of the Spirit People (all published by And Other Stories). He lives in Barcelona, Spain, with his wife and their two sons, where he teaches literature and creative writing. Muyesser Abdul’ehed (pen name: Hendan) is a poet, writer and educator. A native of Ghulja in the north of East Turkistan, she completed a medical degree at Beijing University, followed by a master’s in University of Malaya. After relocating to Turkey in 2013, she resolved to focus on writing and teaching the Uyghur language. Her debut novel, Kheyr-khosh, quyash (‘Farewell, Sun’) is the first work of fiction to focus on the internment camps in East Turkistan. Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. She has published four collections of poetry, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestini