Amani Lazar

Amani Lazar is a well-known literary translator and writer from Homs in Syria, and holds a diploma in Law from the faculty of Law in Damascus. From her base at the International People’s College (IPC) in Elsinore, Lazar continues her work as a literary translator, and participate in collaborations with the cultural sphere in Helsingør, in Denmark and internationally.

Over the course of her career, Lazar has translated a large number of short stories, poems, articles and books from English into Arabic. She is known to be one of the few female Arabic translators who dare to translate texts by contemporary writers who are not known to the wider Arabic readership.

Lazar’s translations of the work of Charles Bukowski, John Fante, W.G.Sebald, Kim Echlin, Jojo Moyes, and many others, have been well received by readers, fellow translators, as well as critics. Recently Amani Lazar has translated the Danish classic, Babette’s Feast, into Arabic, which was published summer 2018 in Kuwait.

Along with thousands of other civiliansm, Amani Lazar was trapped in the middle of an active battlefield in Homs, where she was living. She witnessed some of the most brutal battles in the ongoing Syrian war, and when bombing increased dramatically in the city, she found shelter in a village in the remote suburbs of the city, close to ISIS held areas.

An active translator and writer, and a woman, her situation was extremely vulnerable. She stayed in the suburbs of Homs until she was able to leave for her residency in Elsinore.

Lazar has written and published several texts in popular literary online magazines as well as in her personal blog Sunofamani. In those texts, Lazar tackles many concepts, one of which is life in a warzone. Amani Lazar tends to write in a personal and intimate manner about her fears of the war, yet those texts can relate to all the women trapped in the middle of a warzone. Examples of her work can be found online: Ma3azef.com, assafir.com, al-adab.com, annahar.com, O2 publishing.com