Pitt's Children’s Lit Program will host a book talk about the Thunderbird Trilogy, a Palestinian middle grade fantasy series published in translation by University of Texas Press. (See below for more info.) The third of the series will be released on September 10. In celebration of the release, we’ll hear a presentation by author Sonia Nimr and translator M. Lynx Qualey. Pitt PhD student Hebah Uddin offer a response and will lead the Q&A.
According to the US publisher, the University of Texas press: "The Thunderbird trilogy is a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure centered on Noor, a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to get four magical bird feathers and save the world." All three books are on sale with the code UTXSUMMER and can be found here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/search-grid/?keyword=thunderbird+series.
Sonia Nimr is an award-winning Palestinian writer, storyteller, translator, and oral historian who has published more than two dozen books for children and young adults. She is an assistant professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University.
Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She has published essays and short fiction in a number of magazines, including Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Ex-Puritan. She founded ArabLit, which won a “Literary Translation Initiative” award at the 2017 London Book Fair and an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. She reviews for various magazines and newspapers and has translated a handful of novels, including the Palestine Book Award-winning Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, by Sonia Nimr, and Haya Saleh’s Wild Poppies, which was shortlisted for the 2024 GLLI Award. She was also shortlisted for the Banipal translation prize in 2023 for the first two novels in Sonia’s Thunderbird trilogy and is very excited for you to read Maria Daadouche's forthcoming sci fi novel Golden Eyes. She is also a co-founder of the “WorldKidLit” initiative and co-hosts the BULAQ podcast, which explores literature of the Maghreb and Mashreq.