About Us

About Ward Book House،

 

The beginning of Ward Book House for Publishing and Distribution started as a cultural adventure in 1996 with modest means, to help spread beauty and culture in the Arab region and in the midst of a crowd of Syrian and Arab publishing houses with a long history and unlimited cultural, commercial and financial relations. However, our priority of focus has always been on literature from around the world, by translating it and presenting it in the best way possible, in addition to some publications in theatre, poetry, literary and critical studies.

A very limited handful of these publishing houses set the cultural-cognitive goal as a primary goal, and Ward Book House had to take risks in the midst of the publishing chaos, commercial competition with its modest project armed with firm will, persistent insistence, and an overwhelming desire to advance the cultural-cognitive issue, specifically in Literary, fictional and world fields.

We’ve translated many authors from various languages by hiring the best translators there are based on each language.

We’ve published from all over the world such as J. M Coetzee,  Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, Antonio Gala, Ramón Mayrata, Pascal Quignard, Gilbert Sinoué, and some of them were invited to visit Syria, we’ve also presented the best Arabic edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha with collaboration and funding from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, considering we’re a cultural corporation and profit has never been our main priority, but to deliver the books with the best quality we can obtain, we’ve published for many Arabic authors as well such as Waciny Laredj, Haidar Haidar, and Abdellatif Laabi, we’ve also translated and published Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, The Mahabharata, along with Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Hermann Hesse, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Honoré de Balzac, and many other classics from world literature. 

We have collaborations with various agencies from all over the world, such as Penguin Random House , Grasset, Peter Lampack, Gallimard, Albin Michel, Curtis Brown, InkWell, The Wylie Agency, Andrew Nurnberg, Fayard, Faber & Faber and many more, we’ll also be publishing later this year for authors such as Elizabeth H. Winthrop, Kenizé Mourad, Pearl S. Buck, Tariq Ali, William Golding, J. G. Ballard, Hanif Kureishi, Gilbert Sinoue, Ernesto Sabato, Angela Carter, Joseph Campbell and other to come ahead.

The silent and quiet struggle, in addition to the dynamism of the project family, and the founder of the house was the crane and bridge to bring the project to its good cultural reputation during the few years not exceeding ten years of the life of the house.

The selection of the book prepared for publishing was of good quality, its international reputation and its author, and the search for competent translators who were proficient in foreign languages: English, French, Spanish … etc., a task that included some difficulties and pitfalls, especially in the competitive and commodity commercial publishing world.

It was and still is the best and the highest testimony of the house: the reader, this ruling – like a sword, in the end, in addition to that the testimony of Arab intellectuals with the deep cultural quality of the house as a cultural project – knowledge and enlightenment and achieving excellence.

Through the exhibitions that are held in Arab capitals, Ward Book House has proven its worth and forefront, and has significantly attracted the attention of educated elites, in addition to its credit of serious and distinguished readers. The project, which was founded on a land whose goal is to enlighten knowledge, starting and aiming, progressing gradually with time towards the fullest, to be a garden and a source of contemporary Arab culture, through international and Arab fictional works, and bold testimonies of the age.

“القراءة تغّير كلَّ شيء”.