Fikry El Azzouzi is one of Flanders most versatile artists: he is a novelist, a prolific theatre maker and playwright, as well as a well-known columnist and opinion maker.
Azzouzi debuted in 2010 with the well received short novel Het Schapenfeest (‘The Feast of the Sheep’). For his novel Drarrie in de nacht and his play Jihad Travels, he was awarded the 65th Arkprijs van het Vrije Woord in 2015. It is a sustained focus on present and past multicultural and ethnic relations that forms the backdrop of El Azzouzi’s work. Throughout his often satirical and funny work, he weaves a warning that Europe today is nurturing intercultural intolerance and prejudice.
His most recent work is the 2019 novel De beloning. In The Reward, El Azzouzi presents the impressionable Zakaria, a Belgian teenager of Moroccan heritage, who dreams of greatness but fails to take the right life decisions. It is an extract from De beloning that our Sheffield 4th year students are translating into English in close collaboration with peers at University College London and Nottingham.
Our Digital Translation Project draws on the professional guidance of translators Alice Tetley-Paul and Jonathan Reeder. Both are familiar faces in Sheffield: Tetley-Paul graduated in 2010 with a BA in German with Dutch and Reeder has worked with our students for nearly a decade on a variety of translation projects.
El Azzouzi's visit was kindly supported by the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), Flanders Literature (Literatuur Vlaanderen), and New Dutch Writing.