Gloucester Road Books host the great Spanish author and translator, Munir Hachemi, who will be discussing his wonderful novel, The Mulai, in conversation with the author, poet and creative writing teacher, Constantine Blintzios.

The Mulai, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches, is a wholly original examination of lanaguage, identity and the fragile nature of civilisations. Here's more from the novel's publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions:

An archaeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community, a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth. Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable.

Drawing on Borges, Le Guin and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.

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'Wild, insightful and impressive.’ — Publishers Weekly

'A beguiling tale of Otherness that is not only a translation from another language but another planet, a story told so well that every familiar word feels as new as an alien horizon.’ — Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity

'If Borges wrote hard science fiction, it might well look like this … You can almost feel the author grinning at you as you read, and I daresay you’ll end up grinning back by the end.’ — Drew Broussard, LitHub

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Munir Hachemi’s career as a writer began with them selling their stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. They are the author of Living Things and The Mulai, and are also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, they appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list.

Constantine Blintzios is a writer, translator and academic whose debut novel, The Smoke is Me, Burning was published in 2022. He has had poetry, short stories and reviews published in journals such as Visual Verse, Ash magazine, Paris Lit-Up, the Oxonian Review and the Literary Review.

Munir Hachemi photo credit: Carlos Gil

Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio — Read more — Read less