Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.the87press.co.uk/shop/p/the-dance-of-the-fig-tree-emne-nasereddine

Stuart Bell is a writer, editor, and translator of French literature. His publications include the edited volumes ‘French Cinema: Stardom, Gender and Popular Film’ (2026), ‘On Feminist Films’ (2024) and ‘Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience’ (2021), as well as translations of several contemporary novels and poetry collections. He has twice been Translator in Residence at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his rendition of Édith Azam’s ‘Bird me’.

Emné Nasereddine was born in France in 1990 and grew up in Lebanon where she studied French literature at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Her poetry explores her experiences of immigration, loss and mourning, the lives of Lebanese women, and the customs and traditions of southern Lebanon. The Dance of the Fig Tree is her first book and won the 2021 Émile Nelligan Prize. She lives in Montreal.

Published on 4 June 2026 by Moth Books, this is the second of Iris Wolff’s books to appear in English, and was shortlisted for the 2024 German Book Prize. It tells of the deep, almost lifelong friendship between Lev and Kato, who are in their late thirties when we first meet them. Their story is told in reverse, as Wolff takes us back through their lives to their childhood in a village in the north of Romania, gradually revealing what has made them the people they are today.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/clearing/iris-wolff/ruth-martin/9781917593045

‘A wonderful novel’ Die Zeit Book of the Month

‘A magnificently contemporary book’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘Iris Wolff proves to be a superlative storyteller.’ The Times Literary Supplement

Ruth Martin has been translating fiction and nonfiction books since 2010, by authors ranging from Joseph Roth to Angela Merkel. Together with Charlotte Collins and Nino Haratischwili, she won the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for Nino’s epic novel The Eighth Life. Her translation of Shida Bazyar’s The Nights are Quiet in Tehran was shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Iris Wolff, born behind the iron curtain in the medieval town of Sibiu, Transylvania in 1977, is a writer whose work carries the reader deep into her former homeland. The fate of those who stay and those who choose to migrate is the constant and powerful theme weaving through her novels. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 2025 Uwe-Johnson Prize for outstanding literary works, last awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck in 2022 for her novel, Kairos.

One of a great many poems which will be in my book from Arc Publications. Brecht wrote about 3,000 poems, but priority always went to his plays.

Translator bio
Timothy Adès, rhyming translator-poet with eleven books from French, Spanish, German and four awards, also rewrote Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets without using letter E. He runs a bookstall of translated poetry, his own works and many others. He is a trustee of Agenda magazine, and is on Facebook and YouTube.


Author bio
Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956, the great playwright, was also a very great poet. Son of a pastor, an exile from Nazism in Scandinavia, he crossed Russia, reached Hollywood and eventually returned to East Berlin, running the Berliner Ensemble.


Forthcoming poetry book from Arc Publications: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/writers/timothy-ades