Exodus of the Storks

Overview

The first English translation of the 2017 European Union Prize for Literature winner

Nabil, a Palestinian exile who has made his life on the Mediterranean island of Malta, has his equilibrium shattered when he receives a phone call telling him that his father has died in Jordan. This news releases a flood of memories centered on the unending tragedy of the Arab world.

As he reflects on his father’s death Nabil is forced to confront his Palestinian roots. Born in 1967, he was involved in the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at the end of the Six-Day War. Like so many of these displaced and disenfranchised people, his family spent years moving around the Middle East, including neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. And when Nabil finally settles on Malta he discovers in its hybrid culture of east and west a pale shadow of home.

Nabil’s meditations expand to encompass the entire Arab world, with its colonial past, its postcolonial legacy, its fragmentation, human suffering and political turmoil.

Part stream of consciousness and part history of the Middle East, Exodus of the Storks is an ambitious literary achievement, as Walid Nabhan movingly evokes the Arab experience. It is a novel for our times of international upheaval and displacement.

Author Biography

WALID NABHAN was born in Amman, Jordan in 1966. His family originated in a small village in the outskirts of Hebron, Palestine. He arrived in Malta in 1990 where he studied laboratory technology. In 1998 he graduated in Biomedical Sciences from Bristol University In 2003 he gained a masters degree in Human Rights and Democratisation from the University of Malta. Writing in Maltese, a language related to Arabic, he has published two collections of short stories, a collection of poems, and the novel L-Ezodu tac-Cikonji (Exodus of the Storks), for which he won the National Book Prize in 2014.

Albert Gatt trained as a linguist and computer scientist. His research focuses on the use of language in artificial (AI) and human systems, and on the relationship between perceptual and symbolic data. He has translated poetry and prose by several Maltese authors, including Clare Azzopardi, Karl Schembri, Claudia Gauci and Achille Mizzi. Recent translations include Last-Ditch Ecstasy by Adrian Grima (Malta: Midsea Books, 2017 and Mumbai: Paperwall Publishing) and In the Name of the Father by Immanuel Mifsud (UK: Parthian, 2020).