Longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize
Jumaana Abdu – Translations
Fiction · Penguin Random House
About the Book
Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural New South Wales to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region’s imām.
During a storm, she drives past the town’s river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah’s growing bond with Shep strains her devotion to Hana.
Finally, all are thrown together for a reckoning alongside Hana’s brother, Hashim, and Aliyah’s confidante, Billie – a local Kamilaroi midwife she met working at the hospital – while bushfires rage around them.
Jumaana Abdu’s glistening debut novel, Translations, challenges every assumption a reader may hold.
– 2025 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Jumaana Abdu
Jumaana Abdu is a Dal Stivens Award winner and an alumnus of the Wheeler Centre Next Chapter program. Her work features in Thyme Travellers (Roseway Publishing), an international anthology of Palestinian speculative fiction. She has been published elsewhere in Kill Your Darlings, Westerly, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Liminal, Overland, Debris and New Australian Fiction 2024. During the day, she is a medical doctor.
Further Reading
Reviews
“In this, it is a deeply satisfying read, a book that can be inhaled in mere days yet will linger in the reader’s mind much longer, so propulsive is Abdu’s plotting and so multifaceted, so expansive, her world.” Dženana Vucic, Kill Your Darlings
“Abdu’s prose is alive with emotional depth: the house Aliyah inhabits, her memories and even her self-imposed restrictions pulse with vitality.” Dorcas Maphakela, Arts Hub
“And yet Translations is never overwritten: Abdu plays with ambiguity and unknowing, peppering her novel with deliberate gaps where readers’ imaginations can flourish.” Sonia Nair, Meanjin
Links
Read an interview with Jumaana Abdu in Liminal
Judges’ Report
Jumaana Abdu’s glistening debut novel, Translations, challenges every assumption a reader may hold. Set in rural New South Wales, Abdu sidesteps every stereotype expected of the Australian bush narrative, and instead leans into the complexities of friendship, love, faith and family. ‘Across the years, disaster after disaster had sounded sirens through her life like a city wailing evacuation’, Abdu writes of Aliya, whom we follow as she moves with her young daughter to a rural town and attempts to build – literally – a new life on the land, as far as possible from her previous experience as a well-kept married woman. Abdu picks at the tensions between trauma and isolation, faith and community, and what it means to make a home as a migrant on stolen land. Independent, Muslim, devout and possibly queer, Aliyah is a new type of protagonist in Australian literature. Translations is a joy to read.
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