“My Home is ‘the between’”: An interview with N.S. Koenings (Swahili)

We’ve reached our fourth installment of Translator’s Cut, our journey around the literary world with the translators who make world literature possible. In this issue we’ve reached the continent of Africa and the Swahili language. We feature Nathalie S. Koenings, a fiction writer, anthropologist, and translator who spent her childhood in East Africa, speaking Swahili, French, and English. Her fiction draws on her work in anthropology, where her main concerns have been popular geography and the historical imagination in East Africa. Her published work includes the novel The Blue Taxi and the short story collection Theft, as well as scholarly articles about popular history and politics in rural Zanzibar.