A couple of months ago I wrote about a new initiative to translate important books into Arabic.

The project, known as Kalima, is backed by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and aims "to fund the translation, publication, and distribution of high-quality works of classic and contemporary writing from other languages into Arabic" - starting with 100 titles in the first year.

My article on Cif about this last September attracted a lot of comments, many of them nominating titles (seriously or facetiously) for possible translation.

I mentioned at the time that Kalima's list of the first 100 titles was due to be announced in November; in fact, it was announced this morning and you can view it here.

Kalima has selected books from 16 languages including Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Latin and ancient Greek. Out of the 100, 52 are from English, 10 from French, nine from German and seven from Latin.

Seventy-one of the books are classed as "contemporary" (written after the second world war) and, on the literary side, include such writers as Nadine Gordimer, Khaled Hosseini, Haruki Murakami, Albert Camus and George Eliot.

I think it's a pretty good start.