Beyond their ability to find words and make a text sing, there is above all a demanding reader behind a literary translator.

Your first novel, Ce que je sais de toi, has sold over 300,000 copies and been translated into more than ten languages. How did this writing project come about?

Writing this book was, above all, a challenge I set myself. I'd never studied literature, nor taken a creative course, but I wanted to write a novel with human plots and feelings, characters you could get attached to, and set them in the context of my parents' Egypt. I had this story in mind, which seemed beautiful to me, but I didn't know if I'd have the talent to tell it. Writing has long been a hobby for me: I never imagined turning it into a published book, let alone a career change, but life sometimes surprises us.

You started writing this novel some ten years before its publication. How did the writing process unfold? How did the text evolve over the years?

To write this book, I needed a precise, structured plan, to know, chapter by chapter, what was going to happen. From that point on, I gave myself the time to unfold it, to write the story based on that plan. It's a first novel, so no one was waiting for me: I had no pressure, no publisher, no impatient readers, and even those closest to me didn't know I was writing. The writing process spanned more than fifteen years, from my early twenties to my early forties. The story didn't really evolve from my original plan, because I knew quite early on what I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it, but I think it's a time of life when style changes, becomes more refined... So a lot of work went into making the process coherent, especially as I write out of order. There was also editorial work, carried out with Catherine Leroux, a very talented Quebec author. It was the first time the text had opened up to someone else's light, and collaborating with someone of her stature was something galvanizing.

What were the main stages of the mentoring process? How did the exchanges with the young translators unfold?

The workshop lasted four or five days, which enabled us to get to know each other well and develop affinities, to get closer and, at times, even confide in each other. The first step was to select a number of extracts: this was done by Sahar Youssef, the workshop's supervising translator, with the help of the Karkadé agency. On this basis, we got the young people to work, individually or in groups, to come up with their own translations of each of the extracts. This enabled them to exchange and compare their points of view on the best way to render a text. The aim was to remain faithful to what the author had wanted to say, while trying to preserve the little melody of his writing.

Translation is a necessary gateway to audiences who don't speak your language, and it can be both frustrating and exciting.

Translators were able to work on extracts from your work. What do you think of the work carried out during this workshop?

My role was above all to convey my intention behind the writing of the various passages, to help them understand the choice of a term or formula. As I don't speak Arabic, it would have been difficult for me to give an opinion on the quality of their translations, but it was fascinating to take part in their debates on the difficulty of translating certain metaphors and how to bring a text to a new audience, which doesn't necessarily have the same cultural references. The majority of the translators were Arabic-speaking and had French as their learned language, but there were also people whose mother tongue was French: it was very interesting to see the dynamics this could create within a group and how they could help each other construct the text, but also bridge the gap between the two languages.

In the course of the translations this book has undergone since its release, I've found that translators are among the people who have helped me most to understand my own writing. A translator who wants to do his or her job well forces you to verbalize your intention behind a sentence, and this is not always fully conscious.

To conclude, what place do you give to translation? Do you think about it from the moment you write as a future stage in the life of your works?

At the time of writing, I wasn't even thinking about publication so the idea of translations was very remote. It's really something I discovered with the release of this book and the buzz it's generated. Translation is a necessary gateway to audiences who don't speak your language, and it can be both frustrating and exciting. Frustrating because someone else chooses words in a language you don't master, whereas literature is a field in which the author has mastered just about everything. But it's also exciting when the exchange becomes a four-handed rewrite to overcome a specific difficulty. Translators are among the best readers of a text, as I recently found out when talking to my Japanese translator. She had pinpointed details that no one else had picked up on, and from which she drew highly relevant feedback. Above and beyond their ability to find the right word and make a text sing, there is above all a demanding reader behind a literary translator.