In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic (+SVIZRA 3)

Ussama Al Shahmani left his native Iraq and is living as an asylum-seeker in Switzerland. Worried about his brother in Baghdad and bewildered by the inscrutable behaviours of the Swiss (such as their strange propensity for walking in the woods), he initially struggles to get to grips with life in this new land.

He grapples with feelings of loss and questions of identity, torn between his adopted country and the culture he was forced to abandon. But, little by little, with the help of a couple of kind strangers, he starts to find his feet and discovers a sense of home through the natural world.

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+SVIZRA is a series of eight playfully designed chapbooks published as an exciting showcase of contemporary writing from the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Romansh. It takes its name from the Romansh name for ‘Switzerland’ and is the result of our latest collaboration with an international group of authors, translators, publishers, designers and editors.

In publishing them, along with other sets on the way, we are continuing our mission to broaden the appreciation and breadth in the UK of contemporary European writing in particular and international literature in general against a still rising political tide of mutual suspicion, intolerance and aggression.

In giving equal visibility and weight to each of the four languages, +SVIZRA offers a range of Swiss writing never before seen in English from a diverse group of some of the best authors living and working in Switzerland today, including National Literature Prize winning Anna Ruchat, Iraqi exile Usama Al-Shahmani, and Romansh author, Rut Plouda.