Early in April of 1784, behind the grime-streaked walls of King’s Bench Prison in south London, a twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Smith received news of her first publication. The poet wasn’t locked away on her own account. When Charlotte was fifteen, her father had arranged for her marriage to Benjamin Smith, the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful…
I’ll never forget the day I saw my first massacre. Or, rather, its fresh aftermath. It might’ve been in the context of the Ambazonian Crisis. It might’ve been Boko Haram–related. But at the beginning of the video, there’s a mountain of clothed corpses, bare feet and arms smeared in red clay, protruding from the tangle…
The Regular Reading Period is open! We welcome unsolicited submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction during our Regular Reading Period, open from June 1 to January 15 at 12:00pm EST. Ploughshares is published four times a year: blended poetry and prose issues in the winter and spring, a prose issue in the summer, and a special longform…
Yu Miri directly tackles homelessness in Japan in her 2014 novel, focusing on the memories and reflections of the ghost of a homeless migrant manual laborer, Kazu, as he wanders through the titular park, which had been his home.
In her exploration of the Chernobyl disaster, Svetlana Alexievich dramatizes history—as she insists, we can only understand events of this magnitude by recasting them on a human scale.
“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…
In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator, editor, and wanderer. She has spent many years in different cultures and communities across the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. Her writing and translation work has been published in Granta, Freeman’s, Social Movement Studies, Jadaliyya, Alif, Banipal, and Craft (forthcoming), as well as several anthologies….
Austin Woerner is a Chinese-English literary translator whose work has appeared in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a novel, The Invisible Valley (Small Beer Press, 2018), and two volumes of Ouyang Jianghe’s poetry, and the editor of Chutzpah!: New Voices from China (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015)….
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