Bio

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator from French of books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and has been awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant, the French Voices Grand Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell and the National Endowment for the Arts. For the entirety of his work, he has been named a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Eden at Dawn by Karim Kattan from French. Kattan is a leading contemporary Palestinian writer born in 1989 in Jerusalem, raised in Bethlehem, and naturalized in France as a teenager. He co-founded el-Atlal, an arts and writing residency in Jericho and hosts “Midnight Ocean,” a radio show that airs live at midnight every Friday. Eden at Dawn centers on the inner lives of two men, Isaac and Gabriel, as they fall in love amid a sandstorm that makes Jerusalem nearly uninhabitable. The novel is narrated by an ever-changing sky that peers in on them through windows. Published in 2019, the novel has been shortlisted for major prizes, including the prestigious Prix Renaudot.