The Gateway Trust is keen to promote writers, books and ideas that can deepen the English speaking world’s knowledge of Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim countries.

If you live in a developed country, you will be all-too-familiar with the limited range of books on the non-Western world, but particularly books about Arabic-speaking and other Muslim countries. Apart from books aimed at specialist readers, new titles are often dominated by accounts of wars, life behind palace walls, and threats from terrorism.

We believe there is a clear need for more books that can illuminate the colour, depth and complexity of culture, faith, ideas, people and politics; titles that are accessible to a broad readership and written by authors from within these countries.

If you are a writer of non-fiction with a fresh, innovative perspective on culture, environment, history, politics, people and society, we would like to hear from you. We would like to both encourage new writing and translate existing works into English from languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Urdu.

We do not fund direct translations. But we are all too aware that both commercial and university publishers can rarely afford to fund translations as the sales of the resulting publication cannot usually repay the cost. This is one of the reasons why so few Arab and Muslim voices, in particular are published in English.

This is one reason why we are keen to establish a literary agency for Arabic-speaking and other predominantly Muslim countries (see Gateway News for more on this).