Women Dreaming

BY Salma / TRanslated from tamil BY Meena Kandasamy

Longlisted, 2022 Dublin Literary Award

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

What a life! She didn’t like being here, and she didn’t like going there.

Mehar dreams of freedom and a life with her children. Asiya dreams of her daughter’s happiness. Sajida dreams of becoming a doctor. Subaida dreams of the day when her family will become free of woes. Parveen dreams of a little independence, a little space for herself in the world. Mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, neighbours…

In this tiny Muslim village in Tamil Nadu, the lives of these women are sustained by the faith they have in themselves, in each other, and the everyday compromises they make. Salma’s storytelling – crystalline in its simplicity, patient in its unravelling – enters this interior world of women, held together by love, demarcated by religion, comforted by the courage in dreaming of better futures.

A beautiful novel by writer and activist Salma, translated from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy.

Contributors’ details

Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil women’s experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance. Her debut novel The Hour Past Midnight was long listed for the Man Booker Asia Prize.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novels The Gypsy Goddess and When I Hit You, Or, The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. She is the editor of the poetry collection Desires Become Demons (Tilted Axis Press 2019), in which her translations of four Tamil women poets are included alongside some by the late Lakshmi Holmström.

PRAISE

One of the F Word’s Best Books of October

‘What heightens this novel (…) is Salma’s elegant writing and genuine feeling for the characters whose inner life she brings so carefully to light.‘ – The Big Issue

‘A thoroughly lived-in novel in which the characters’ dilemmas are both tactile and deeply felt.‘ – Words Without Borders

‘Salma is part of an Indian Islamic feminism that has been taking shape over the past few decades, but her hard-won personal victories give her voice universal resonance and a unique, reified timbre. (…) Her second novel, Women, Dreaming (2016), now translated into English by Meena Kandasamy, tells the interlinked stories of six women in a small, orthodox Muslim village in Tamil Nadu. Their names are Subaida, Asiya, Parveen, Mehar, Amina, and Sajida, but their stories are those of Everywoman — they struggle alike against their chains, they dream similar dreams.‘ – Vaishna Roy, The Hindu

‘Salma’s novel takes you into a world of women. It is writing that describes the inner universe of women who do not know the outside world. Salma deftly shows these women navigate their sad, emotional landscape, holding time in their hands, gradually stepping outside their sorrows. Everything here is fresh, including their feminine language. Traditionalist mindsets may not be taken in by this novel where stories emerge from under the blanket of tradition, revealing that a break with the old order is inevitable.’ – Perumal Murugan, author of One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat

‘Women Dreaming is an evocative double bill of fierce feminine landscapes with the iconic Salma’s searing narrative rendered in translucent English by the hugely gifted Meena Kandasamy.‘ – Namita Gokhale

MORE INFORMATION

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-46-8 (print) / 978-1-911284-45-1 (ebook)

• Publication date: 15 October 2020

• Extent: 388 pp

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 127mm)

• Rights held: World English (excl India)