In House with trace press

My name is Nuzhat Abbas, and I’m the founder and director of trace press, a (very) small press based in Tkaronto. We publish literary translations of fiction and poetry from the global South, as well as innovative literary nonfiction in English.

Our 2023 collection, River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, which I edited, serves as a kind of manifesto for the press. It brings together writers, translators, and poets from the global South and its diasporas to explore personal, political, and theoretical ideas around feminism, decolonialism, and translation. It’s been wonderful to observe the global impact of this book, and we’re thrilled that it’s now being taught in translation, creative writing, migration, gender-studies, and art-history programs in Canada, the US, UK, and Europe.

In 2022-2023, we began a series called trace: translating [x] that supports feminist, antiracist, and decolonial translation projects through workshops, collaborations, and conversations with translators, poets, and writers. We started with Arabic and Tamil—two ancient languages with complex histories of poetry and translation, and are eager to share books that emerged from these vibrant conversations, debates, and editorial processes.

The first, Arabic, between Love and War, edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi, juxtaposes modern and contemporary poems from Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia and their diasporas, alongside their translations into English (and some from English into Arabic). Many of these poems have been translated into English for the first time, and remind us of Arabic’s lyricism, poetic range, and beauty in the face of ongoing war and genocide.

The second title in this series, Tamil Terrains, edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran, connects Tkaronto’s vibrant Tamil diaspora with the language’s multiple locations in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore. It’s a thought-provoking, experimental collection which invites the reader to read poems by Indigenous poets like shalan joudry and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson alongside translations of ancient and modern Tamil texts on love, migrant labour, and war-related displacements. This theoretically astute, serious, yet playful intervention needs to be read by anyone interested in questions of war, migration, and labour, and in feminist and decolonial poetic and translation practices.

In the fall, we explore the body’s vulnerability in relation to poetry and memory with Whirlwind of the Heart, a memoir by the noted Ghalib scholar Mehr Farooqi, who finds herself turning to the great 19^th century Urdu poet’s ghazals as she grieves the death of her father and her own unexpected heart-attack, while recalling her complicated coming-of-age in the great Indian literary city once known as Allahabad.

2026 will be a significant year for poetry at trace, as we release our first set of single-author titles translated from Tamil, Arabic, and Urdu, and perhaps…our first English-language poetry collection as well. We’re also planning some fiction titles to follow.

As a new publisher, and one that remains something of an anomaly within Canadian publishing (which, as a whole, remains majority white at 75%, according to the 2022 Canadian Book Publishing Industry Diversity Baseline Survey), we’re incredibly grateful for the support we’ve received from independent bookstores across Canada, the US, and globally, and from our wonderful global South and diaspora writer, poet, and translator community. I began trace with no money, and few connections within the Canadian publishing sector. I still don’t get to pay myself a salary for the work I do, though we make sure that all who work for us as authors, translators, designers, and editors receive proper fees. I’d like readers to keep such inequities of access, funding, and opportunity in mind when they buy books, especially if they’re genuinely committed to supporting feminist, decolonial, transnational and queer-run publishing.

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Thank you to Nuzhat for sharing the origins of trace press and its vital publishing program.