BULAQ | بولاق

Ibtihal Reda Mahmood, editor and translator of the anthology Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan joins us to talk both about the Jordanian literary landscape from the 1940s to now, as well as her personal relationship with Jordanian writers and books. We talk particularly about the iconic feminist and master of the short-story form Basma Nsour, and how Ibtihal came across her work as a pre-teen; the late, gifted, and generous Amjad Nasser, whose work still needs further translation; and the great Abdulrahman Munif’s Story of a City, which describes his childhood in the Jordanian capital of Amman during the 1940s. SHOW NOTES Abdulrahman Munif’s Story of a City was translated by Samira Kawar and published by Quartet books in 1997. There is no book-length collection of Basma El-Nsour’s work in translation, but there are many stories available online: at ArabLit, The Common, and elsewhere. Amjad Nasser’s incredible poetry collection Petra was translated by Fady Joudah. His Land of No Rain was translated by Jonathan Wright. The twentieth century Jordanian classics that made the list of the “105 Best Novels of the 20th Century,” as voted by the Arab writers union, were: Sultanah, by Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa, Confessions of a Silencer, by Jordanian writer Mu’nis al-Razzaz, and Essential Pillars, by the Jordanian author Elias Farkouh. Although many Jordanian books elide place, one novel that shows the landscape of contemporary Jordan is Ma’an Abu Taleb’s All the Battles, which was translated by Robin Moger. You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com.

The Key is a new online publication dedicated to covering Palestine as “the core issue at the heart of the modern world.” We’re joined by its editor-in-chief, Sara Yasin, former managing editor of the LA Times. The Key is an outgrowth of PalFest, an annual traveling literature festival that gathers Palestinian and international writers in Palestine.You can find The Key at thekeymagazine.comWe talk about Lama Zuhair Khouri’s essay “The Conscripted Container” and Sara reads a poem by Tamara Nasr.We encourage you to become a subscriber and supporter of The Key, which you can do at their website.You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers. Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire. Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode from a few years ago, we wandered through Arabic poetry and prose and talked about many different forms of literary love: regretful love, unreciprocated love, bad love, vengeful love, liberating love, married love. We read this poem by Núra al-Hawshán: “O eyes, pour me the clearest, freshest tearsAnd when the fresh part’s over, pour me the dregs.O eyes, gaze at his harvest and guard it.Keep watch upon his water-camels, look at his well.If he passes me on the roadI can’t speak to him.O God, such afflictionAnd utter calamity!Whoever desires usWe scorn to desire,And whom we desireFeeble fate does not deliver.”The Núra al-Hawshán poem, translated by Moneera al-Ghadeer, has a modern musical adaptation on YouTube produced by Majed Al Esa.Yasmine Seale’s translation of Ulayya Bint El Mahdi. This poem and others were set to music on the album “Medieval Femme.”Do’a al-Karawan (“The Nightingale’s Prayer”) by Taha HusseinI Do Not Sleep, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, trans. Jonathan SmolinThe Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57)Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door) Latifa al-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth (1960) All That I Want to Forget, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Michele Henjum.Rita and the Rifle, Mahmoud Darwish, made into a song by Marcel Khalife. Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Egypt’s January 25 revolution was 15 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. After spending over a decade in prison, the activist and writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah was finally released from prison in September, and allowed to travel outside Egypt in December. We are re-running an episode we did about Alaa’s 2021 book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, and other writing on the Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. Show Notes Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was translated by a collective, and is out from Fizcarraldo Editions in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming in March 2022 from Seven Stories Press. There is also an Italian translation by Monica Ruocco.Ahmed Douma’s second poetry collection, Curly, was set for release in September 2021 by Dar Maraya. But on the eve of its publication, state security officials confiscated copies of the book. Read Elliott Colla and Ahmed Hassan’s co-translations of a poem from this collection, and an excerpt from Douma’s “Blasphemy,” on ArabLit. Basma Abdelaziz’s Here is a Body, which chronicles the Rabaa massacre and its aftermath, was published in Jonathan Wright’s translation by Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an excerpt on the Hoopoe website.Also, join our #bulaqbookquiz for a chance to win a release from one of ten participating publishers. Send your answers to bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ursula traveled to Paris to talk to Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat about writing in Arabic while living at a distance from home; listening to the voices of characters who are destined to defeat; and starting each of her books with a question. This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. Hoda Barakat was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2025 for her novel Hind, or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Barakat’s other award-winning novels include The Stone of Laughter, The Tiller of Waters and Disciples of Passion. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae Barakat’s biography and a description of her novel can be found on the SZBA website.During this episode, we read part of Marilyn Booth’s translation-in-progress. Booth also translated several other novels by Barakat, including her International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning Bareed al-Layl, translated to English as Voices of the Lost.You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this sponsored episode, we talk to Sheikh Zayed Book Award winner Andrew Peacock about his work on Arabic literary culture in southeast Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a rich time for the burgeoning Arabic literary culture—alongside Javanese, Malay, Aceh, and other literary cultures—in several regions in the Malay Archipelago.This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. Today’s guest, Professor Andrew Peacock, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2025 in the category of “Arab Culture in Other Languages,” for his book “Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”While listening to this episode, you might want to look at a map of the regions discussed, or browse photos of a few of the Arabic manuscripts in question. You can find them at arablit.org/peacockThe Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae Professor Peacock’s biography and a description of his book can be found on the SZBA website.  You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a teenager in Cairo in the early 1940s, Inji Efflatoun made two great discoveries: art and the Communist Party. Although she was from an elite French-speaking background, Efflatoun chose to “re-Egyptianize” herself, pursue painting and throw herself full-heartedly into anti-imperialist, feminist and leftist agitation. She was eventually arrested during President Nasser’s repression of Communists in the early 1960s. It was in prison that she embarked upon the most productive stage of her career as an artist. Today, her prison portraits and the vibrant, luminous paintings of Egyptian rural life she painted after her release are iconic. In this episode we speak to Ahmed Gobba and Avery Gonzales, co-translators of Efflatoun’s 1993 memoir, “The Memoir of Inji Efflatoun: From Childhood to Prison.” The memoir is the nucleus of a new book, The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun, published by SKIRA and edited by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh. It comes out in the US on October 7 and is available to pre-order now. You can view a digitalized collection of Efflatoun’s work on the Barjeel Art Foundation’s website and read a review of the book in the National by Razmig Bedirian. This episode was produced in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation -- an independent Sharjah-based institution, founded in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi to preserve, exhibit and research one of the most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art from the Arab World. One of the Barjeel Art Foundation’s objectives is developing a public platform to foster critical dialogue around art practices, to convey nuanced Arab histories beyond the borders of culture and geography. For more information about the Barjeel Art Foundation’s activities and exhibitions, please visit www.barjeelartfoundation.org You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. Several years ago, we discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim’s most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.” Show Notes: Hosam Aboul-ela is a professor of English at the University of Houston and the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. Ibrahim’s first novel, That Smell, and his prison diaries, have been published in a single volume, trans. Robyn Creswell, from New Directions. Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela’s translation, from Yale University Press.Hosam’s translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth is available from New Directions.Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, in Tony Calderbank’s translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.Ursula wrote a little something about her meetings, interviews and memories of Ibrahim here: https://www.ursulalindsey.com/blog Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri grew up poor and illiterate on the streets of Tangier in the waning years of colonialism. He told the story of his childhood in his autobiographical novel For Bread Alone – El Khubz El Hafi in Arabic, Le Pain Nu in French. Choukri went on to write much more, chronicling life in post-independence Morocco during the “years of lead,” and the marginalized underclass of Tangier: its barflies, prostitutes, petty criminals, day-to-day survivors. We spoke to scholar and translator Jonas El Busty about the unique subversiveness of Choukri’s work, and why it still resonates so strongly today. We also talked about the reception of Choukri’s work, and the power dynamics embedded in its translation. SHOW NOTESJonas El Bousty is a professor of Arabic at Yale University. He has translated Choukri’s short story collection Tales of Tangier, as well as the third installment of Choukri’s autobiography, Faces, and is the editor, alongside Roger Allen, of the scholarly anthology Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives: Hunger in Eden. For Bread Alone was translated by Paul Bowles, in a process that remains contentious to this day. Choukri’s writing about some of the famous Western writers – Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles – who visited or lived in Tangiers is collected in In Tangier Ursula recently wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on Choukri, Tangier, colonialism and nostalgia.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Batool Abu Akleen is a poet and translator in Gaza, Palestine. Her home in Gaza City and her university have been bombed and she has been displaced multiple times. We talked to her about refusing to write and then choosing to write through the genocide; about the importance of mentors; and about creating a community of literary translators in Gaza. Her first full-length collection, 48 kg, is set to appear from Tenement Press in June of this year. (Apologies for the sound quality; Batool spoke to us from one of the rare public venues in which it is possible to access the internet in Gaza; the connection was less than perfect and there is some background noise). Batool’s discussion of her new collection and the meaning of its title is at 16.46 and Batool and Marcia’s reading of the poem Milad/Birth is at 20.24. Show notes:You can pre-order Batool’s 48kg from Tenement Press. It’s coming June 15. Batool also has poems in the new GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly  and in Modern Poetry in Translation’s Salam to Gaza.Batool is one of the authors of Comma Press’s forthcoming Voices of Resistance, set to appear in August 2025.You can also read work by Heba al-Agha at ArabLit.You can donate to Batool’s GoFundMe at gofundme.com/f/donate-to-support-batools-causeYou can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Author, commentator and human rights advocate Khaled Mansour joins us to talk about how reading Arab women’s memoirs can help one gain a new understanding of the region’s collective history. After he worked with Egyptian psychoanalyst and feminist Afaf Mahfouz to write her autobiography, Mansour began a journey through Arab women’s memoirs set to culminate in his forthcoming podcast, المرآة (The Mirror). One of the many books he discusses with us is Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled’s account of her life and militancy, published in 1973, My People Shall Live.Show notes:You can find Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live available free through the Internet Archive.Afaf Mahfouz’s من الخوف إلى الحرية is available from Kotob Khan.Links to Khaled Mansour’s work can be found on his website. Memoirs by Nawal El Saadawi, Arwa Saleh, Huda Shaarawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, Radwa Ashour are available in English translation. A list of these and more is available at arablit.org. You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Journalist, novelist, and memoirist Omar El Akkad talks about his latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – a blend of memoir, social criticism, and moral philosophy. The book creates and shares space for everyone who is full of grief and rage, who cannot be at home in institutions that support or ignore genocide. We discuss the linguistic obfuscations around Gaza, El Akkad’s critique of Western liberalism, and the possibilities for a different future.Show notes:You can get One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This from Penguin Random House, where a sample of the audiobook is available, read by Omar El Akkad.Omar’s first novel, American War, is also available from Penguin Random.You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Journalist, author and editor Alia Malek tells us about her recent visit to Damascus and about the anthology of Syrian writing she edited for McSweeneys. Aftershocks was released in December 2024, just days after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and the country's political prisons began to crack open. The collection brings together work by sixteen Syrian authors who write from diasporic and refugee experience, as well as from inside Syria. We discuss these key Syrian literary voices and how they and others are meeting this moment.Show notes:Get the Aftershocks anthology from McSweeney’s at store.mcsweeneys.net.Malek’s 2017 book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, is available from Bold Type Books.Read Malek’s reflections on the death of her father, “‘He Didn’t Want to Lie in a Grave That Couldn’t Be Visited” and her recent “What Did the World Learn From Syria?” in the New York Times.Read a short conversation with Aftershocks contributor Rawaa Sonbol, “On Being a Writer in Syria Today” and her short story “The Noose Boy,” both at ArabLit.We mention the late Syrian writers Khaled Khalifa and Saadallah Wannous. The photo of Alia Malek in Damascus in January 2025 is by Sabir Hasko. You can subscribe to BULAQ on all your favorite podcast networks. You can also follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books, where we post about upcoming episodes and literary events. Please don’t forget to rate and recommend BULAQ. We are a non-profit, listener-supported program. If you’d like to make a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. BULAQ is a co-production with the podcast platform Sowt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Comics artist Rawand Issa joins us to talk about her book Inside the Giant Fish (trans. Amy Chiniara, Maamoul Press); her path from journalism to graphic art; artist groups and collectives across the region; the “new school of Arab comics,” and the challenges of making a living as a comics artist. We also talk about a few other Lebanese graphic novels, particularly Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, and Lena Merhej’s I Think We’ll Be Calmer in the Next War.Show Notes:You can find several of Rawand’s books available from Maamoul Press: http://maamoulpress.com. Also read Rawand’s “Being Illegal is Unbearable at The Nib, her  ماذا نفعل في مواجهة استمرار العنف ضد النساء؟ at Jeem and her untitled work in Chime.And if you missed it, there’s a discussion with Rawand and translator Amy Chiniara about Inside the Giant Fish at ArabLit.Samandal magazine is on Instagram (@samandalcomics), and you can find them at samandal-comics.org.You can buy copies of the magazine Corniche at the Sharjah Art Foundation website.Lab619 (@lab619), Skefkef (@skefkefmag/), and Fanzeen Comics (@fanzeencomics/) are on Instagram, while TokTok has a website, toktokmag.com.Rawand Issa (@rawand.issa_) and Amy Chiniara (@amychiniara) are both on Instagram, too.Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, from Pluto PressLena Merhej’s We Will Be Calmer in the Next War is available online.Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we talk through some literary news from Algeria and France, discuss two big translations out this fall from towering authors, as well as a new favorite by Maya Abu al-Hayyat. Then we turn to Read Palestine Week and the new collection focused on writers in Gaza, And Still We Write, before a discussion on refusing to work with Israeli publishers that are complicit in the violence against Palestinians. Show notes:Author Kamel Daoud sued over claim he used life of wife’s patient in novel (The Guardian)An excerpt from Aziz Binebine’s own account of Tazmamart, translated by Lulu Norman (WWB). Binebine’s story was the basis for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light.Radwa Ashour’s classic Granada Trilogy is finally out in its complete form, in Kay Heikkenen’s translation. You can find the launch discussion at the AUC Press YouTube.The late Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, translated by the late Humphrey Davies, was published in November by Archipelago Books.Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s soon-to-be-classic No One Knows Their Blood Type is out in Hazem Jamjoum’s vibrant translation this fall, from Ohio State University PressYou can get a free digital copy of And Still We Write from the ArabLit storefront, https://arablit.gumroad.com/ Those who want a print copy can get one through Mixam.The letter on refusing to work with Israeli publishers complicit in violence against Palestinians is on the PalFest website.Ahdaf Soueif responds to some criticism of the letter in the London Review of Books.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s guest, Irene Lozano, is the director of a Spanish cultural institution, Casa Arabe. It received the 2024 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Cultural Personality of the Year. As we’ll discuss, Casa Arabe is a center of learning, discussion and exchange between Spain and Arab countries. It offers Arabic language classes and a myriad of cultural initiatives and programs, including hosting talks by many prominent Arab writers. In this episode, we discuss the connection between Arabic and Spanish culture, representations of the Arab world in Spain and much more. This episode of the BULAQ podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for the award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply. Find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moroccan author Karima Ahdad was the winner of this year’s Arabic Flash Fiction contest run by ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel, which saw more than 900 entries from around the world. We read her award-winning story in Katherine Van de Vate’s discussion and discuss patriarchy, story creation, and what it means to write “feminist” work.Show Notes:Karima was also shortlisted for an earlier edition of the ArabLit Story Prize. You can read her shortlisted story, “The Baffling Case of the Man Called Ahmet Yilmaz,” in Katherine Van de Vate’s translation.Katherine also translated an excerpt of Karima’s The Cactus Girls for The Markaz Review.You can read a conversation between Karima and Katherine about Cactus Girls on arablit.You can find more about all Karima’s books at her website, karimaahdad.com.On the topic of the “political” novel, we mentioned Rabih Alameddine’s new book, Comforting Myths.The Arabic Flash Fiction prize is funded by the British Council’s Beyond Literature Borders programme corun by Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions. Find all the finalists at ArabLit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An epic historical novel set in Fatimid Cairo, Reem Bassiouney’s The Halva-Maker trilogy won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award and is forthcoming in English. The book explores the founding of Cairo, by a Shia dynasty and a set of generals and rulers who all hailed from elsewhere. We talked to Bassiouney about balancing research and imagination; shining a light on women in Egyptian medieval history; and the heritage (architectural and culinary) of the past. This episode of the BULAQ podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for the award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply. Find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.aeBassiouney is a professor of socio-linguistics at the American University in Cairo. She has won the State Award for Excellence in Literature for her overall literary works, the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature from the Supreme Council for Culture for her Sons of the People: The Mamluk Trilogy (trans. Roger Allen), the Sawiris Cultural Award for her novel Professor Hanaa (trans. Laila Helmy), and a Best Translated Book Award for The Pistachio Seller (trans. Osman Nusairi). Dar Arab will publish Bassiouney’s The Halva-Maker trilogy and her novel Mario and Abu l-Abbas. Both have been translated by Roger Allen.Bassiouney’s Ibn Tulun Trilogy, also translated by Roger, was published by Georgetown University Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We recorded this interview with Deen in January 2022, just as her debut urban-fantasy trilogy Shubeik Lubeik (“Your Wish is My Command”) was coming out in English. This original and beautifully illustrated story imagines that wishes of varying quality can be bought and sold in contemporary Cairo, with unpredictable and poignant results. It has been widely celebrated and nominated for a Hugo Award.While the US edition from Pantheon keeps the title “Shubeik Lubeik,” the UK edition from Granta uses a literal translation: “Your Wish Is My Command.”Find more of Deena’s work at http://deenadraws.art and on Twitter and Instagram as @itsdeenasaur.The original Arabic three volumes were published by Dar Mahrousa and are available in the US through Maamoul Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Art critic and journalist Kaelen Wilson-Goldie joins us for a sweeping look at the life, writing, and art of singular Lebanese author-artist Etel Adnan (1925-2021).  Kaelin Wilson-Goldie’s Etel Adnan is available from Lund Humphries.Adnan’s Time, translated by Sarah Riggs, is available from Nightboat Books.The Beauty of Light, a collection of interviews with Laure Adler, is available from Nightboat Books in Ethan Mitchell’s translation. It was initially published in French, as "La beauté de la lumière, entretiens," by Éditions de seuil, in 2022.An excerpt from Adnan’s “Jebu” is available in the single issue of the magazine Tigris, hosted on ArabLit.Sitt Marie Rose is available in Georgina Kleege’s English translation from the Post-Apollo Press.Adnan’s essay “On Small Magazines,” where she writes of meeting Abdellatif Laâbi, is available on Bidoun.Adnan’s “To Write in a Foreign Language” describes her journey with and through languages.All the images used in promotion of this episode are courtesy of the Sfeir-Semler Gallery.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Majalla 28 is a literary magazine out of Gaza co-producing an issue with ArabLit. We talk about the work by co-editors Mahmoud al-Shaer and Mohamed al-Zaqzouq and read excerpts from that issue. After that, we talk about a particular kind of Palestinian literature – by writers serving life sentences. Find out more about the Gaza issue at arablit.orgMore writing by Heba Al-Agha, translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso, is also available at arablit.orgYou can read more about the late author Walid Daqqa, who died in an Israeli prison, at JadaliyyaPalestinian prisoner Nasser Abu Srour’s The Wall, translated by Luke Leafgren, is out now from Other PressA Mask, the Colour of the Sky, by Palestinian writer Basim Khandaqji, won this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Khandaqji is serving three consecutive life sentences; his novel is forthcoming in English translation from Europa Editions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ghassan Kanafani is best known for his famous novellas, but he was many things besides a talented writer: a prolific journalist, an insightful critic and editor, a heterodox Marxist, a spokesman for the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He wrote and lived like he had no time to waste (which turned out to be true: he was assassinated in an Israeli car bombing at the age of 36). He remains one of the most respected and beloved of Arab icons, but his non-fiction work is less known than it should be. In 1970 he wrote a book of historical analysis: The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine. Its translator, historian Hazem Jumjam, joined us for a conversation about this book on a failed revolution and everything we can still learn from it today. Hazem Jamjoum’s translation of Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine is available from 1804 Books.Mahmoud Najib’s translation of Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature is available from Ebb Books.Kanafani’s complete works in Arabic are available from Rimal Books.Kanafani’s Men in the Sun was adapted to film as The Dupes (1972). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode features writing from and about Gaza, and explores the imperative to write, between hope and hopelessness, at a time when words both seem to count enormously and to not be enough. Show NotesThis episode’s cover art is by Chema Peral @chema_peralLetter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani was written in 1956.Mahmoud Darwish’s Silence for the Sake of Gaza is part of his 1973 collection Journal of an Ordinary Grief. The poet Mosab Abu Toha has written about his arrest and his family’s voyage out of GazaAtef Abu Seif’s “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” is forthcoming from Comma PressFady Jouda’s poetry collection [...] is forthcoming from Milkweed PressYou can read poetry in translation by Salim al-Naffar and Hiba Abu Nada, both killed under Israeli bombardment, at ArabLit. Other magazines that have been translating and sharing Palestinian poetry include Mizna, Fikra, LitHub, The Baffler, and Protean magazine.The book that was removed from the curriculum in Newark is the book Sonia Nimr co-wrote with Elizabeth Laird, A Little Piece of Ground. Ghassan Hages’ essay “Gaza and the Coming Age of the Warrior” asks: “Is it ethical to write something ‘interesting’ about a massacre as the massacre is unfolding?”Andrea Long Chu’s essay “The Free Speech Debate is a Trap” calls for “fighting with words.”At the end of the episode, Basman Eldirawi  reads his poem “Santa” in honor of Refaat Alareer, an educator and poet who was killed on December 7. #ReadforRefaat is part of a week of action being called for by the Publishers for Palestine collective.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to Robin Moger about how he became a translator from Arabic and about what has changed in recent years in the field of Arabic literature and translation and what has stayed the same. Moger’s first book-length literary translation was Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s 2008 novel الفاعل, which became A Dog with No Tail. His most recent is a translation of Iman Mersal’s في أثر عنايات الزيات, which appears as Traces of Enayat from And Other Stories in the UK (2023) and Transit Books in the US (2024). Show Notes:This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. For more information about the award visit zayedaward.aeMoger’s old website, Qisas Ukhra, is still available at qisasukhra.wordpress.com. The poem “The Translator’s Soliloquy,” which was read on this episode, is also there. More information about his online and offline translations is available at his website: www.robinmoger.com/translations.You can read an excerpt of Traces of Enayat at ArabLit.Don’t miss our previous episode with Iman Mersal, “The Books You Need to Read and Write.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Said Khatibi’s detective novel نهاية الصحراء (End of the Sahara) is set in a remote desert city in Algeria in the Fall of 1988, when the country’s October Riots are about to break out place. The book is one of the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Khatibi explained how his writing is also a way of exploring larger historical crimes. Show Notes:This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.Today’s guest, Said Khatibi, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2023 in the category of Young Author, for his novel نهاية الصحراء, or “The End of the Sahara.” Khatibi is a writer and journalist who is based in Ljublana, Slovenia.Khatibi’s 2018 novel Sarajevo Firewood was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2020, and he won the Katara Prize for his 2016 novel Forty Years Waiting for Isabel. His Sarajevo Firewood was translated by Paul Starkey and is available from Banipal Books. Edith Maud Hull's 1919 novel The Sheik was adapted into a 1921 film of the same name starring Rudoph Valentino.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Egyptian novelist Hamdi Abu Golayyel died last month at the age of 56. In this episode, we remember Hamdi and his one-of-a-kind literary career, telling the story of Egypt’s laborers, Bedouin, and migrants. Show Notes:Egyptian Novelist Hamdi Abu Golayyel Dies at 56: ‘There Was No One Like Him’A Special Section at ArabLit on Abu Golayyel, Bedouin Poetry, and ‘The Men Who Swallowed the Sun’Mohamed Kheir remembers HamdyBooks available in translation are: Thieves in Retirement (translated by Marilyn Booth), A Dog with No Tail (translated by Robin Moger), and The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies.Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Comics artist Rawand Issa joins us to talk about her book Inside the Giant Fish (trans. Amy Chiniara, Maamoul Press); her path from journalism to graphic art; artist groups and collectives across the region; the “new school of Arab comics,” and the challenges of making a living as a comics artist. We also talk about a few other Lebanese graphic novels, particularly Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, and Lena Merhej’s I Think We’ll Be Calmer in the Next War.Show Notes:You can find several of Rawand’s books available from Maamoul Press: http://maamoulpress.com. Also read Rawand’s “Being Illegal is Unbearable at The Nib, her  ماذا نفعل في مواجهة استمرار العنف ضد النساء؟ at Jeem and her untitled work in Chime.And if you missed it, there’s a discussion with Rawand and translator Amy Chiniara about Inside the Giant Fish at ArabLit.Samandal magazine is on Instagram (@samandalcomics), and you can find them at samandal-comics.org.You can buy copies of the magazine Corniche at the Sharjah Art Foundation website.Lab619 (@lab619), Skefkef (@skefkefmag/), and Fanzeen Comics (@fanzeencomics/) are on Instagram, while TokTok has a website, toktokmag.com.Rawand Issa (@rawand.issa_) and Amy Chiniara (@amychiniara) are both on Instagram, too.Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, from Pluto PressLena Merhej’s We Will Be Calmer in the Next War is available online.Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Translator Sawad Hussain joins us to talk about the challenges of making a living as a translator, the art of co-translation, her focus on Arabic literature from Africa and the Gulf, and the advice she gives to her translation mentees. We also highlight three of Sawad’s recent and forthcoming translations: Haji Jaber’s Black Foam, Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind, and Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls.Show Notes:Haji Jaber’s Black Foam, co-translated by Sawad Hussain and M Lynx Qualey, came out in February from AmazonCrossing. You can read reflections on the novel at Hadara magazine and listen to a sample at Amazon.Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind was published, in Sawad’s translation, by Fitzcarraldo. As Sawad mentions, there is an audio long read at The Guardian.Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls is forthcoming from Dedalus Press in August in Sawad’s translation. You can read an excerpt and a review at ArabLit, as well as other work by Gaitano.You can find our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ursula and MLQ look back at notable books from 2018 and at reads they are looking forward to catching up on over the holiday break. Show notes‘Tis the season for “best of” lists. Ursula wrote about Notable Books of 2018 From and About the Arab World in Al-Fanar; a number of them are books we have discussed on the show. One that we haven’t is Casablanca, Nid d’artistes, ed. Leila Slimani and Kenza Sefrioui.  Marcia was still working to compile the “Arab Authors’ Favorites” list that ArabLit runs every year. Early favorites included Mohamed Kheir’s Afalaat al-‘asabie, Muhairi Huwaidi’s Wa Kan al-Bayt Akhi al-Saba’a, and Mohamed Shoair’s Awlad Haretna: Biography of a Forbidden Novel. We talked about Shoair’s Biography of a Forbidden Novel, which focuses on Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Our Alley, and the intimidation of other public intellectuals, particularly Nasr Abu Zeid and Farag Fouda. Shoair’s book is dedicated to Taha Hussein and Nasr Abu Zeid. Yasmine Rashidi wrote in the New York Times about “How Egypt Crowdsources Censorship.” Nawal Nasrallah was one of the winners of the $2M Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, based in Qatar, for her translation of the fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table. And, on December 11, Saudi writer Omaima al-Khamis was announced as the winner of this year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, for her historical novel Voyage of the Cranes over the Agate Cities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is almost entirely dedicated to the work of the Moroccan film-maker, novelist, artist, and poet Ahmed Bouanani – much of which has yet to be released, and much of which was censored or destroyed in his own life.Show notesBouanani’s cult-classic novel L’hôpital was re-published in 2012 by DK Editions in Morocco and Editions Verdier in France. Muhammad al-Khudairi’s Arabic translation was published in 2016. Two of Bounanai’s books have been released this year in English translation: The Shutters (translated by Emma Ramadan) and The Hospital (translated by Lara Vergnaud), both from New Directions Press.  A fragment of Bouanani’s filmwork can be seen online: his film about Casablanca in the 1960s,  “6 et 12”, is on YouTube, as is a section of As-Sarab / Mirage. The film-maker Ali Essafi’s documentary about Bouanani is entitled Crossing the Seventh Gate.Touda Bouanani, Ahmed Bouanani’s daughter and a visual artist, has conserved his work and featured it in her own.Ursula’s piece on Bouanani in the New York Review of Books is unfortunately pay-walled now.Marcia should have a piece about the discovery of Naguib Mahfouz’s “lost” manuscript, set to be published December 11 by Dar al-Saqi in Lebanon, forthcoming soon in LitHub. An extended Q&A with translator Roger Allen, agent Yasmina Jraissati, and manuscript-discoverer Mohamed Shoair will follow on ArabLit. The English translation of what’s being called The Whisper of Stars is forthcoming from Saqi Books in 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We overcame communication blocks and interrupting children to speak to the poet Zeina Hashem Beck about how she’s given herself permission to write poems that move between English and Arabic. We also discuss James Montgomery’s heart-breaking essay on grief, memory, trauma and translating a 7th century Arabic poet famous for her elegies.Show notes:Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet who lives in Dubai. She won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts (April 2017) as well as the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize for There Was and How Much There Was, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, as well as many more prizes you can read about on her website.The first of her new “duet poems,” which weave together separate and distinct threads of Arabic and English, appeared in The Lifted Brow, with more forthcoming in The Adroit and Modern Poetry in Translation.She read the poem “Blue / أزرق.”James Montgomery, author-translator of Loss Sings, is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. This collection of Montgomery’s meditations is twined with translations of seventh-century poet al-Khansa’. It is part of The Cahier Series published by Sylph Editions in collaboration with The American University of Paris. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we talk about recent developments in Cairo, kids’ literature in Arabic, Naguib Mahfouz, and the launch of Marcia’s new project, the literary magazine ArabLit Quarterly.Show notes  It was at the October 22 outreach symposium in Cairo that MLQ launched “ArabKidLitNow!” – a collective for the promotion of Arabic children’s literature in translation. The website is arabkidlitnow.com.We mention the extraordinary work of the Egyptian Mada Masr news site, including this ground-breaking story. At the website, you can learn about the titles that won this year’s Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, the top regional award for Arabic kid lit, including Koozy (about losing your kitty), Think of Others (an illustrated version of Mahmoud Darwish’s famous poem), and Mama, My Classmate, a chapter book about the narrator’s mom coming to learn English with her in class. The YA prize went to Walid Daqqa, a 57-year-old Palestinian writer who’s been behind bars since the age of 25, called The Secret of Oil.Ursula’s long-awaited essay “The World of the Alley: Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo,” finally appeared in The Nation. Ursula talked about reading Gamal al-Ghitani’s Meetings with Mahfouz, how al-Ghitani brought her to meet the master, and Mahfouz’s iron habits.MLQ talked about the Fall 2018 debut of ArabLit Quarterly, set for a November 15 release. The theme of the first-ever ArabLit-affiliated magazine is “beginnings.” Those who want to be subscribers can do so through Patreon; otherwise, a storefront will be ready on November 15.Finally, we circled back to Cairo and the lovely coffee-table book Khatt: Egypt’s Calligraphic Landscape, out in September from Saqi.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we talk to an old Cairo friend, acclaimed Egyptian artist Ganzeer, about art, propaganda, publishing and how much damn work it is to put out a graphic novel. Show notesThe work of artist and writer Ganzeer can be found at ganzeer.com, thesolargrid.net, and timesnewhuman.com. You can sign up for his newsletter at restrictedfrequency.com and follow his YouTube channel, Ganzeer Says. The first four chapters of The Solar Grid are available for download at thesolargrid.net, and his earlier collaboration, The Apartment at Bab El-Louk (written by Donia Maher, co-illustrated by Ahmed Nady, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), is available from Darf Publishers and online.The new Epic of Gilgamesh graphic novel was translated by Kent Dixon and illustrated by Kevin Dixon.The Rusumat comix platform, featuring works in Arabic and in English, is at rusumat.co. Buy on thesolargrid.net Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk about looking down on dialect; passing literary theft off as “salvation”; the beginning of awards season; a book that is a fragmented portrait of Jerusalem; and our fellow podcasters in the region.Show notesThe controversy over the appearance of some darija (Moroccan colloquial) words in a Moroccan school textbook reached the highest levels of government.Since we recorded Episode 20, Israel’s Resling Publishing has pulled a short-story collection, Horreya, in which they published women’s short stories translated from Arabic to Hebrew. Resling’s statement says that they are investigating the matter. The cover image, by the Lebanese cartoonist Hasan Bleibel, was also taken without permission, and the artist was not credited for his work. Earlier, Resling’s chief editor, Idan Zivoni, gave a statement that was translated and posted on Hyperallergic.The shortlist for the first-ever ArabLit Story Prize was announced September 15; longlists for the major French literary prizes have also appeared. Moroccan author Meryem Alaoui made the Goncourt longlist with her La verite sort de la bouche du cheval, and Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek made the Prix Femina longlist with Khaled Osman's translation of her المشّاءة, translated to La Marcheuse in the French, and working title The Blue Pen in English. The work of postcard-like fragment-stories set in Jerusalem is Mahmoud Shukair’s Jerusalem Stands Alone, which has recently been translated by Nicole Fares for Syracuse University Press.We also mention some other great podcast networks in the region: Sowt from Jordan and mstdfr from Saudi Arabia.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk about the relationships between education and literature; about a devastating entry in the prison memoir genre, from Syria; about the legacy of V.S. Naipaul; and about why Kuwait is the worst offender in the region for censoring books.Show notesThis was our back to school episode, informed by the scholarship of Erin Twohig and Ursula’s “Hard Lessons: North African Writers on Education” at al-Fanar. We particularly talked about Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine, a satiric and scathing account of the life of a schoolteacher in Morocco, and also Radwa Ashour’s writing on education, in her The Journey (translated by Michelle Hartman) and her later Spectres (translated by Barbara Romaine).The discussion also veered slightly to the interview and mixtape with Ma3azef magazine co-founder Ma’an Abu Taleb on Bidoun.Ursula’s summer reading included Mustafa Khalifa’s devastating novel The Shell, based on his experiences in Syria’s Tadmor prison, in which he reclaims and re-inscribes humanity. It has been translated to English by Paul Starkey.The death of V.S. Naipaul led to several interesting conversations about his work and legacy. Here is one, between Nikil Saval and Pankaj Mishra in n+1.And here is a piece by Teju Cole from a few years back about meeting the writer.Finally, Kuwaiti readers are pushing back against censorship -- you can follow the online part of the campaign at #ممنوع_في_الكويت and #صور_كتاب_ممنوع_في_مكتبتك. MA student Abrar Alshammari is writing up a longer essay on the current situation for Arablit, but for background, 'It's like they were selling heroin to schoolkids': censorship hits booksellers at Kuwait book fair at The Guardian and Leading Kuwaiti Writers Saud Alsanousi and Bothayna al-Essa on Pushing Back Against a Season of Censorship at ArabLit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our last episode before a summer hiatus, we discuss a graphic novel about the life and art of the stars of Arab music and cinema; Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour’s memoir of studying at university in the United States in the 1970s; and the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani’s novel The Hospital, out in English (alongside a new poetry collection, The Shutters) after nearly falling into oblivion.  Show notesA record-breaking four of the 18 “PEN translates” prizes for 2018 are going to books translated from Arabic. They are: The Book of Cairo, edited by Raph Cormack, with various authors and translators; My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury,translated by Humphrey Davies; Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, also translated by Jaquette. More about the great Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannouscan be found at the World Theatre Day website.A Seismography of Struggle: Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Magazines is a project of the French National Institute of Art History; an exhibition and talks were recently hosted by Kulte Gallery in Rabat. The Iraqi comix collectivethat was refused Swiss visasis Mesaha,and you can find more about them on their Facebook page.Lamia Ziade’s Ô Nuit Ô Mes Yeux is a stylish, charming illustrated text about the larger-than-life lives of Arab musicians. An excerpt titled “Fairouz in my Grandfather’s Shop,” translated into English by Edward Gauvin, appears in the July 2018 Words Without Borders. Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon has been translated into English by Olivia Snaije. Another beach read is Radwa Ashour’s The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, translated by Michelle Hartman. Other portraits of the US discussed: Tawfiq al-Hakim in The Revolt of the Young, which has been translated by Mona Radwan; Yusuf Idris’s New York 80; Alaa al-Aswany’s Chicago, which was translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa; Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s Sleeping with Strangers, translated by Chip Rossetti; and Sayyid Qutb.And—there is some debate over whether this is a beach read—but  Moroccan author-filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, translated by Lara Vergnaud, and his The Shutters, translated by Emma Ramadan are newly out from New Directions Books, and get a recommendation both from Ursula and from MLQ. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to humorist Karl Sharro about the origins story of his Twitter alter-ego Karl ReMarks and about finding the ideal online nemesis. Marcia takes issue with a new book listing the “hundred best novels in translation.” Show notesKarl Sharro spoke about Karl ReMarks’ new book, And then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News’ (and Analysis). The book is forthcoming July 9.Boyd Tonkin’s The 100 Best Novels in Translation was released June 21. The two Arabic novels that made the list were Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan. The translation was overseen by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, along with Martha Levin, and their notes on the manuscript can be found at the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.You can read the Amazon press release online about how the mega-corporation has (finally) launched some 12,000 Arabic ebooks into the Kindle system. You can find and purchase them on Amazon.com.    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which Ursula and Marcia discuss how much innocence American can claim when abroad, and the urge to write expatriate diaries in one’s twenties; they also talk about the new collection Marrakech Noir; and about the never-ending debate over Classical versus Colloquial Arabic. Show notes:Ursula’s “Innocence Abroad” responds primarily to Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. Marrakech Noir, ed. Yassin Adnan,is the third Arab city to join the Akashic Books series, following Beirut Noir and published simultaneously with Baghdad Noir. The Marrakesh collection features stories by lesser-known writers like Hanane Derkaoui, whose “A Way to Mecca” has some particularly fun moments, as well as heavyweights like Mahi Binebine, Mohammed Achaari, and Fouad Laroui—whose short-story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers was translated by Emma Ramadan. Fouad and Emma previously talked with MLQ about the collection and about writing in Moroccan Arabic. Hossam Abouzahr, who runs the excellent “Living Arabic” project, also wrote “Standard Arabic is on the Decline: Here’s What’s Worrying About That.” In part, it responds to Elias Muhanna’s much-discussed New Yorker essay on “Translating ‘Frozen’ into Arabic.”Jeremy Harding wrote in the LRB about writing workshops in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine.Two fun, free Arabic-learning apps for young childrenare “Antura and the Letters” and “Feed the Monster.” The Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature also recognizes a “digital book app” category each year.Mohamed al-Bisatie’s World Cup novel is Drumbeat. James Murua first had the idea of creating a writers’ team for the World Cup, using the hashtag #AfricanWriterWorldCupSquad. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Inspired by a fiery essay by an Egyptian professor, Ursula and MLQ discuss cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and literary representations of the city of Alexandria. Marcia also talks about three new books – from Iraq, Southern Sudan and Lebanon/London. She loved two of them.Show notes:May Hawas’s essay How Not to Write on Cosmopolitan Alexandria takes as its starting point Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and particularly the first book, Justine.The renowned poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy has shaped Alexandria’s literary image and aura. Ibrahim Abdelmeguid is perhaps Egypt’s best-known Alexandria-focused author (read his No One Sleeps in Alexandria, for instance, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab), although Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar may the best-known book set in the city. Other major Alexandrian writers include Alaa Khaled and the late Edwar al-Kharrat. Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s St. Theresa, trans. Chip Rossetti, is, in part, about the 1960s expulsions from Alexandria. MLQ admits to not being a fan of Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, sorry.Marwan Hisham’s memoir-reportage Brothers of the Gun, with art by Molly Crabapple, came out May 15. It details life under the Islamic State in Raqqa and covers, from a quite different point of view, some of the same ground as DunyaMikhail’s The Beekeper, which we discussed in Episode 8. Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Occasional Virgin, trans. Catherine Cobham, comes out June 15.Stella Gaitano’s Withered Flowers, trans. Anthony Calderbank, is available in bookshops in Juba, South Sudan. We’ll also see if we can convince them to make it more widely available. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We discuss Marcia’s recent interviews with professors teaching Arabic literature in translation; an essay by Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine’s in which he picks apart “world literature” and foreign writers – such as himself – who act as “tour guides”; and a book that is an ambitious overview of modern art in the Arab world. Show notesAn overview of the “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation” series appeared on the website al-Fanar. The whole series – which will consist nineteen interviewsas of May 21 – can be found on ArabLit. The series will go on hiatus over the summer, but will hopefully be spun into a stand-alone resource.Rabih Alameddine’s“Comforting Myths: Notes from a Purveyor”and takes us from Superman to Joseph Conrad to “the cute other,” with stops at Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Hisham Matar’s The Return, and one of Alameddine’s own novels, which a 2008 New York Times reviewcalled “a bridge to the Arab soul.” As Alameddine has said elsewhere: “What the fuck is the Arab soul?”Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, co-edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, is forthcoming June 5 from Duke University Press. The selection of texts, many appearing for the first time in English translation, includes “manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments[.]” Some can be read online. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ursula and Marcia talk about the novel Tales of Yusuf Tadros – about a Coptic Christian and aspiring artist living in the provinces -- and the playful, genre-bending Kayfa Ta (“How To”) series. They also discuss sexism in literature and whether we can do without the Nobel Prize for Literature. Show notes The Center for Translation Studies at The American University in Cairo will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2020, and to commemorate nine years of CTS lectures—MLQ gave one in 2013—the head of the center, Dr. Samia Mehrez, is bringing together an anthology of essays. The book will be coming out from AUC Press in English, and an Arabic edition will follow.The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction was Palestinian-Jordanian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Dog War II. MLQ had predicted a win for Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of ‘K,’ so her streak of incorrect IPAF predictions is unbroken. You can read excerpts from all six shortlisted books in English translation and an additional one from Dog War II from Wen-chin Ouyang.The Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, is available from Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an extract of the translation online.The Nobel Prize for Literature has been cancelled for 2018. Tim Parks suggests “The Nobel Prize for Literature Is a Scandal All by Itself” and Ron Charles, at the Washington Post, suggests “The Nobel Prize in literature takes a year off. Let's make it two.” Also: “Junot Díaz withdraws from Sydney Writers' festival following sexual harassment allegations.”You can find the Kayfa Ta project’s Arabic originals and English translations at kayfa-ta.com. That’s where you can download a PDF of Haytham al-Wardani’s How to Disappear translated by Jennifer Peterson and Robin Moger, or in the Arabic. Iman Mersal’s How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts is also available in Arabic. Robin Moger’s English translation should be forthcoming somewhere this year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we talk about debates surrounding Western military intervention in Syria; about Arab American writer Randa Jarrar and her Twitter rant against the late Barbara Bush; and about whether there is any alternative to the term “Arab world.” Also Ursula has a squeaky chair. Show notesAt the recent Yale symposium on translation, Samah Salim discussed the relationship between translator, text, and paratext in “Paratext and Political Translation,” with a focus on the introduction, footnotes, and glossary of her translation to Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn. Kamran Rastegar talked about “Translational Infidelity: Paul Bowles’ notes on For Bread Alone.”If you are near Princeton on April 23 at 4:30, do come hear MLQ speak about “Shifting Local, Regional, and International Pressures on Arabic Literature.”The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will be announced Tuesday, April 24. MLQ’s prediction of Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of K as the winner will almost certainly not come true.A Tree Whose Name I Don't Know, by Golan Haji,tr. Haji & Stephen Watts, was a favorite of MLQ’s that did not make the recent Best Translated Book Award poetry longlist. Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, has just been released in English and MLQ was hoping it will receive some prize attention.Leila al-Shami, co-editor of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, is author of “The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots.”Randa Jarrar is the author of A Map of Home (2008), Him Me Muhammad Ali (2016) and a handful of tweets about the late Barbara Bush’s legacy that were turned into a major trolling campaign and news story. She teaches at Fresno State, where President Joseph Castro has suggested the university is investigating her tweets, which, he has alleged, “wasn’t just a free speech issue.”  In “Can Muslim Feminism Find a Third Way?” Ursula writes about the resignation of Asma Lamrabet, a well-known Moroccan feminist, from her position at the Mohammedan League of Scholars. Lamrabet was also discussed in Episode 2. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We spend most of this episode talking about two books: the late Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, a memoir of and reckoning with her time as a leftist student militant in Egypt in the 1970s; and Rabai al-Madhoun’s novel Fractured Destinies -- about lives constrained, conflicted and divided in Palestine.Show notesArwa Salih’s The Stillborn, tr. the brilliant Samah Salim and published by Seagull Books as part of their “Arab List,” curated by Hosam Aboul-ela.Rabai al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning Fractured Destinies (published in Arabic as called Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba), tr. Paul Starkey, and extends the universe of Walid al-Dahman who first appeared in IPAF-shortlisted The Lady from Tel Aviv, tr. Elliott Colla.The claustrophobia was reminiscent of Mohammed Sabaaneh’s collection of political cartoons White and Black. For books in a constellation around The Stillborn, we mentioned: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile, tr. Frances Liardet, Youssef Rakha’s Crocodiles, tr. Robin Moger, and Mohammed Rabie’s Otared, tr. Moger. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which Marcia talks about her difficulties being interviewed; we discuss genre (sci-fi, fantasy, and especially noir) writing in Arabic; and we question whether translation into English “empowers” women writers from the Arab region.Show notesThe Asymptote interview with MLQ, conducted by Claire Jacobson.On voices at various margins: Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz (recently re-translated by Humphrey Davies); Kamal Ruhayyim’s Muslim Jew trilogy (tr. Sarah Enany); the film Marock;  The Others by Seba al-Herz.There is a video of Adam Talib's talk "Translating for Bigots" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANKpO4zmGABaghdad Noir, ed. Samuel Shimon, is forthcoming from Akashic Books later this year. You can already get Tehran Noir, ed. Salar Abdoh, who has a story called “Baghdad on Borrowed Time” in Baghdad Noir. More on noir: The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz, tr. M.M. Badawi and Trevor Le Gassick, revised by John Rodenbeck; Vertigo by Ahmed Mourad, tr. Robin Moger; Metro, by Magdy Shafie, tr. Chip Rossetti; the noir of Algerian-French author Jérémie Guez; Apartment at Bab el-Louk, by Donia Maher, ill. Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette; the films The Nile Hilton Incident and Casanegra; Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s detective series, published by Hoopoe.You can also listen to Jonathan Guyer’s The Strange Case of the Arabic Whodunnit on BBC4.Iraq + 100, ed. Hassan Blasim, is available from Comma Press in the UK and Tor in the US.“Saudi discovers science fiction” or “L'Arabie saoudite découvre la science-fiction” appears on Orient XXI.See more about Osama Al Muslim’s Basateen Arabistan at GoodReads.The novel HWJN, by Yasser Bahjat and Ibrahim Abbas, is available in English and Arabic.You can read Maysaa Alamoudi’s Mimosa in Arabic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which we discuss the validity and necessity of the negative review (or what we like to simply call critical engagement); how rare it is to find negative reviews these days; and the shift that has seen Western reviewers of Arabic literature move from one extreme to another. But is it more condescending to dismiss outright or to offer all-around encouragement? Show notesHisham Aidi's lovely portrait and critical re-evaluation of Juan Goytisolo was published by MERIP “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.” For non-subscribers (and everyone should consider supporting this excellent publication!), a version can be found on academia.edu. And here is Aidi’s piece in The Nation: “Is Morocco Headed Toward Insurrection?”Ursula also recommends Aidi’s Rebel Music (2014) which she wrote about here.Rafia Zakaria penned “In Praise of Negative Reviews.” It references both Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which ran in Harper’s in 1959 and Kristina Marie Darling’s more recent “Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement.”Marcia has written on Arablit about John Updike’s infamous dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, from a time when negative reviews of Arabic literature were more than common.The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (“Arabic Booker”) shortlist was announced on February 21. The biggest controversy was around the inclusion of Shahed al-Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, which is forthcoming in translation by Luke Leafgren in May (US) and June (UK). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ursula and MLQ discuss a moving new book documenting the suffering and the resourcefulness of Yazidi women taken captive by Daesh, and the efforts to help them escape; and the perversely dull newspaper columns of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.Show notesDunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is coming out in March 27, 2018 from US publisher New Directions and as The Beekeeper of Sinjar from the UK’s Serpent’s Tail in August 2018. Both were translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss. Les Revenants: Ils étaient partis faire le jihad, ils sont de retour en France was written by David Thomson and won the Prix du livre Albert Londres in 2017.Historian Omar Mohammed is the force behind Mosul Eye, an independent writer who documented what was happening in Mosul during Daesh’s occupation. He wrote anonymously for three years before revealing his identity in December 2017 and can still be followed at @MosulEye and @omardemosul. One of Mosul’s libraries re-opened this month.Omar Mohammed was interviewed by Al Fanar’s Gilgamesh Nabeel.The Casablanca International Book Fair is going on now through Feburary 18, with Egypt as a guest of honor.The shockingly dull collection Essays of the Sadat Era: The Non-fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz: Volume II was recently released by The Gingko Library and is being distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We discussed our recent readings. This includes some early foreign reporting on Morocco, which is both vivid and prejudiced; a moving account of the way Moroccan political prisoners clung to their memories and their words and refused to be fully “disappeared” during the country’s decades of repression; and a collection of beautifully translate and unusual folktales, shared by Lebanese women with each other. We also discussed the Cairo Book Fair, whose official theme this year is “Soft Power…How?”Show notesWalter Harris’s (1866-1933) Morocco That Was is the book Ursula is considering “hate-teaching”. Harris was a British journalist and socialite who worked as a correspondent for The Times. The book can be read The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco by Susan Slyomovics looks at the words (literary and otherwise) that sent Moroccans to jail during the Hassan II years; the attempts to make peoples and their stories disappear; and the words that eventually exposed the terrible abuses of the “Years of Lead.”The Return by Hicham Matar explores secret prisons in Libya under Ghaddafi, in search of a trace of the author’s kidnapped father.Pearls on a Branch, by Najlaa Khoury, tr. Inea Bushnaq is forthcoming from Archipelago books March 2018. This ridiculously delightful folktale collection is based around work Khoury collected in Lebanon during the civil war, many of which became stage productions. A collection of them was published in Arabic in 2014, and soon they’ll be available in Bushnaq’s fun, luminous, inventive translation.Moroccan Folktales, ed. Jilali El Koudia, translated by Jilali El Koudia and Roger Allen with a critical analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy, is newly available as a paperback from Syracuse University Press this February 2018.The Cairo Book Fair runs this year through February 10, 2018.“The Rise and Fall of Egyptian Arabic” can be found on The Economist.Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi’s ominous recent speech. Sisi is running for a second term against just one other candidate, who turns out to be a great fan of his. "He had electoral tendencies and wanted to nominate himself.But, thank God, he's back to feeling better!!"@abdalla_cartoon in today's Al-Masry Al-Youm, the privatey-owned Egyptian paper, where the jokes on the forthcoming presidential balloting have been riotous. pic.twitter.com/snyE7NKeqv— Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) January 30, 2018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we discuss Moroccan literature about the country’s “years of lead” and its formidable and ruthless former king Hassan II; and about the relationship between humour, fear and power. We look at literary awards and what they are good for, and why Arablit has decided to create a new award. And we ask: how much contemporary Arabic literature is “dystopian”?Show notesYoussef Fadel’s “Moroccan trilogy” will appear from Hoopoe Fiction. They have already brought out A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me (translated by Alexander Elinson) and A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me (translated by Jonathan Smolin), and Elinson is at work on the novel Farah, which would translate to Joy, but will instead be translated as A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me. Mahi Binebine’s Le Fou du Roi (The King’s Fool) is, like A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me, inspired by the figure of Hassan II’s court jester, Binebine’s father, as well as Binebine’s brother, who was imprisoned in the infamous Tazmamart prison. Aziz Binebine is one of a number of former Tazmamart prisoners to have written memoirs. His is Tazmamort.Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc was longlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and is currently being translated by Alexander Elinson.The ArabLit Story Prize is currently raising funds for its first edition.The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) released its 2018 longlist on Wednesday, January 17. Many of the novelists are well-known authors; eight have been on previous IPAF longlists. The longlisted novel The Baghdad Clock, by Shahad El Rawi, has already been translated by Luke Leafgren and will appear in April from Oneworld. Amjad Nasser’s Here is the Rose has been longlisted; his previous novel, Land of No Rain, was beautifully translated by Jonathan Wright. The shortlisted The Frightened Ones, by Dima Wannous, is already out in Italian translation, Quelli che hanno paura.Sonallah Ibrahim’s famous refusal of the Arab Novel Award from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is discussed in this profile.  Yasmine Seal’s article, “After the Revolution,” about three Egyptian novels she considers dystopian, in Harpers’ magazine.It was Robin Moger who asked us to stop describing so much Arabic literature as “dystopian.” The (maybe-sometimes-dystopias) discussed were Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; Ezzedine Choukri Fishere’s No Exit; Mohamed Rabie’s Otared, translated by Robin Moger; Ahmed Naji’s Using Life, translated by Ben Koerber; Nael El-Toukhy’s Women of Karantina, translated by Robin Moger; and Ahmed Khaled Towfiq’s Utopia, translated by Chip Rossetti. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of BULAQ we highlight several new and forthcoming translations from Arabic to English. We also discuss the newly translated Concerto Al Quds by the renowned Syrian poet Adonis, as well as Adonis’ own status as an artist and public intellectual, and his stance on religion and revolution.Show notesArabLit’s list of works forthcoming in translation Winter-Spring is available online. Do keep in mind that, with smaller publishers, release dates can shift.Banthology, ed Sarah Cleave, part of Comma Press’s “banned nations showcase,” is appearing this January 2018 in the UK, and from Deep Vellum in the US in March. The stories are by Anoud (Iraq), Wajdi al-Ahdal (Yemen), Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Somalia), Najwa Bin Shatwan (Libya), Rania Mamoun (Sudan), Fereshteh Molavi (Iran) & Zaher Omareen (Syria).The Iraqi author Hassan Blassim has published several collections of stories with Comma Press, and edited the collection Iraq +100.Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright, is forthcoming from Penguin Random this month, as we celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. It won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, translated by Samah Selim, is forthcoming from Seagull Books this month.Jabbour Doauihy’s Printed in Beirut is forthcoming from Interlink this March, in Paula Haydar’s translation. His great liar-narrator referred to is Eliyya in June Rain (also translated by Haydar) and the Christian-Muslim confusion is in his Homeless, sometimes translated as Chased Away.Pearls on a Branch: Tales From the Arab World Told by Women, collected by Najla Jraissaty Khoury, translated by Inea Bushnaq, is forthcoming from Archipelago. Used copies of Bushnaq’s delightful Arab Folktales, published in 1986, can still be found.Concerto al-Quds, by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa, was released this month by Yale University Press. Two essays we mentioned were “The Man Who Remade Arabic Poetry,” by Robyn Creswell, and Sinan Antoon’s “The Arab Spring and Adonis’s Autumn.” You can also read Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s response to Antoon’s essay, and Antoon’s critique of Mattawa’s previous translation, Adonis: Selected Poems. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we look back at 2017 about talk books published in the past year: notable books, favorite books, books we felt were overlooked, books we don't quite agree on, and books we can't wait to read. We also discuss how not to write about "discovering" Arabic and the Arab world. Show notesArabLit's "Arab Authors' Favorites of 2017" list is available online. Some of the most frequently mentioned books on the list were works of non-fiction: Haitham al-Wardany's Book of Sleep, Iman Mersal's How to Heal: Motherhood and Its Ghosts, and Charles Aql's Coptic Food. A translation of Mersal's book was funded by Mophradat as part of their Kayfa Ta series and brought to English-language life by Robin Moger, although the publisher is still TBA. Maan Abu Taleb's All the Battles was also translated by Robin Moger.Zeina Hashem Beck's poetry collection Louder than Hearts was one of MLQ's biggest discoveries of 2017. Ezzedine Choukri Fishere's Embrace at Brooklyn Bridge, translated by John Peate, was one of the underappreciated novels of 2017. Fishere's Exit Door has been signed by Hoopoe Fiction, and an excerpt from Fishere's 2017 novel All That Rot, translated by Jonathan Smolin, appeared at Words Without Borders.Omar al-Akkad's American War has already been translated to Arabic and published by the UAE-based Rewayat.American War was on the list of 2017 books of note Ursula made for the web site Al Fanar. Also on the list, Bad Girls of the Arab World, a collection of scholarly writing and essays edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas, published by University of Texas Press.Mustafa Khalifa's devastating prison novel The Shell has been translated by Paul Starkey and was published by Interlink. "The Fine Art of Learning to Say Nothing in Arabic," by Adam Valen Levinson, excerpted from the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah and recently published on LitHub, has come in for considerable criticism online. On the other hand, there is writing about learning Arabic that we have loved: "Matthew McNaught's Yarmouk Miniature," published in N+1; Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land; and I.Y. Kratchovsky's wonderful Among Arabic Manuscripts, translated from the Russian by Tatiana Minorsky. The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was presented on December 11 to Palestinian novelist, poet, and short-story writer Huzama Habayeb, for her 2016 novel Velvet. You can read a short profile and interview with the author in The National. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

President Trump just recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a move that acknowledges only a single Israeli narrative. We discuss Palestinian writers and how they write about their relationships with Israelis; about living with trauma and danger; about coming of age under occupation. We also look at the emerging field of children’s and young adult literature in Arabic.Show notesRaja Shehadeh is a Ramallah-based author and attorney who has written a number of celebrated books, including Strangers in This House (2002), Palestinian Walks (2008), winner of the Orwell Prize; A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (2010), and the book that was at the focus in this episode, Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine (2017). Ursula wrote recently about his life and his work for The Nation The Palestine Festival for Literature, created by writers Adhaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton, brings authors, bloggers and journalists from around the world to Palestine every year. You can learn about it here: http://palfest.orgIbrahim Nasrallah is a prolific Jordanian-Palestinian poet and novelist who has won numerous awards. His Time of White Horses, translated by Nancy Roberts, was shortlisted for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and his Gaza Weddings, also tr. Roberts, has just been released in English. An excerpt is available online.The Drone Eats With Me, by Atef Abu Saif, was written during the summer of 2014, when Gaza was under siege. Abu Saif did a 2015 residency in London through the Delfina Foundation.Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness was translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who has a gift for finding the rhythms in Darwish’s prose.Mazen Maarouf, Palestinian-Icelandic poet and short-story writer, won the inaugural Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story in 2016 for his Jokes for the Gunmen, forthcoming in Jonathan Wright’s translation from Portobello Books. This year’s prize, announced December 4, went the Syrian author Shahla Ujayli’s Bed of the King’s Daughter.  Sam Wilder’s luminous translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s Describing the Past was, disappointingly, not on this year’s four-book Banipal Translation Prize shortlist.  Palestinian authors have also been leaders in the new movement toward Arabic Young Adult literature. Sonia Nimr is a past winner of the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, in the Young Adult category, and Palestinian YA writer Ahlam Bsharat has also been shortlisted. Bsharat’s Code Name: Butterfly was translated by Nancy Roberts and shortlisted fort this year’s Palestine Book Awards. The two other Arabic YA novels that have been translated into English are Fatima Sharafeddine’s Faten, translated by the author as The Servant and Emily Nasrallah’s What Happened to Zeeko, translated by the late Denys Johnson-Davies. Other works discussed include Rania Amin’s Screaming Behind Doors, winner of the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature in the YA category, Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird and Taghreed Najjar’s One Day the Sun Will Shine, Sitt al-Koll, and Mystery of the Falcon’s Eye. It was 2003 when Sonallah Ibrahim famously and publicly turned down the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s 100,000LE State Prize, saying that the government hadn’t the credibility to grant it. Sidewalk Salon is the book of 1001 Cairo street chairs. Marcia was incorrect; editors raised half of their $19,000 crowdfunding goal.Books mentioned in this podcast Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape By Raja Shehadeh Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine By Raja Shehadeh Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine By Raja Shehadeh Time of White Horses: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction) By Ibrahim Nasrallah Gaza Weddings: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction) By Ibrahim Nasrallah The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary By Atef Abu Saif Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Literature of the Middle East) By Mahmoud Darwish Describing the Past (The Arab List) By Ghassan Zaqtan Ghaddar the Ghoul and other Palestinian Stories (Folktales from Around the World) By Sonia Nimr A Little Piece of Ground By Elizabeth Laird Code Name: Butterfly By Ahlam Bsharat The Servant By Fatima Sharafeddine What Happened to Zeeko By Emily Nasrallah Sidewalk Salon Cairo: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo (OMP) By Manar Moursi and David Puig Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which we discuss the fictional underworlds of Rabee Jaber and other Lebanese novelists; and explore Saudi poetry, from a new translation of a famous pre-Islamic collection to the satirical poems of “a grumpy old man” in the Najd in the 18th century. At this time when women are denouncing male abuses of power the world over, we look at two Moroccan female writers who are critical of their societies and who face the question of how their work is received and represented at home and abroad. Asma Lamrabet proposes a progressive feminist re-reading of the Quran; Leila Slimani is an award-winning novelist who has written a book on “sexual misery” in Morocco.  Show notes:Beit Beirut cultural center is in the restored Barakat building, built in 1924, devastated during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and used as a vantage for snipers.Rafic Hariri is the father of current Lebanese yes-no-yes-I’m-the-prime-minister Saad Hariri, and was assassinated in an explosion on February 14, 2005, along with twenty-one others. His assassination was the focus of a UN special tribunal.The Mehlis Report, by Rabee Jaber, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is set in the Beirut of the living and the dead in 2005, just before the release of the titular UN report, overseen by public prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.Confessions, by Rabee Jaber, also translated by Abu-Zeid, won this year’s PEN USA translation prize, and is told by a man who was raised by those who killed his family during Lebanon’s Civil War.Limbo Beirut, by Hilal Chouman, translated by Anna Ziajka Stanton, was published by University of Texas Press.It was also Kareem James Abu-Zeid who won a $25,000 NEA grant this week to produce a new translation of the Mu‘allaqat, or “The Hanging Poems,” a collection of works by seven pre-Islamic Arabic poets (although Abu-Zeid will be bringing together works by ten pre-Islamic Arabic poets).Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18th Century Najd, by Hmedan al-Shwe’ir, edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek, will be out December 1 from the Library of Arabic Literature. We read from Poem 19, which begins, “Our plowmen labored in the fields / while he was distracted by little Sarah.”The collection Adrenaline, by Ghayath al-Madhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham, is out this month from Action Books.Asma Lamrabet has been the Director of Studies and Research Centre on Women’s Issues in Islam of Rabita Mohammadia des Ulemas located in Rabat, Morocco since 2011. As it says on her website, “she focuses on rereading Holy Scriptures from a feminist perspective.” In English, you can read Women in the Qur'an: An Emancipatory Reading, translated by Myriam Francois-Cerrah. She recently won Le Prix Grand Atlas for Islam et femmes, les questions qui fâchent.Lullaby, by Leila Slimani, which won the Goncourt as Chanson douce, will be out in English translation by Sam Taylor in January 2018. Her new book is Sexe et mensonges. Ursula has a piece on Slimani here.Veil, by Rafia Zakaria, was published as part of the “Object Lessons” series from Bloomsbury. You can read M Lynx Qualey’s review on The National (UAE).Nawal El Saadawi has dozens of books available in English, including Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and Woman at Point Zero. You can message us at @bulaqbooks, where our DMs are open, or email at bulaq@arabist.net. Books mentioned in this podcast: The Mehlis Report $9.31 By Rabee Jaber Confessions $10.53 By Rabee Jaber Limbo Beirut (Emerging Voices from the Middle East) $14.95 By Hilal Chouman Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18th-Century Najd (Library of Arabic Literature) $35.00 NYU Press The Perfect Nanny: A Novel $12.78 By Leila Slimani Veil (Object Lessons) $14.95 By Rafia Zakaria Woman at Point Zero $11.65 By Nawal El Saadawi Memoirs of a Woman Doctor $11.42 By Nawal El Saadawi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the midst of a crackdown on gay men in Egypt, we discuss Mohammed Abdel Nabi’s novel about being gay in Cairo, In The Spider’s Room. Also: a portrait of a love-hate relationship with a Cairo neighborhood, an award for Arabic Young Adult and children’s literature, a Saudi novelist under attack online, and a Palestinian poet whose trial hinges on translation. Show notesIn the Spider’s Room, by Mohamed Abdelnabi, was on the shortlist for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The novel has been translated by Jonathan Wright and is forthcoming from Hoopoe, an imprint of AUC Press, in 2018. You can read reviews on Mada Masr as well as the much-shared critique on “Notes from Over There.”The Apartment in Bab El Louk, by Donia Maher, Ganzeer, and Ahmed Nady was published in Arabic in 2014 and appears in English this month, November 2017, from Darf Publishers, translated by Lissie Jaquette.Ahmed Naji was recipient of the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award after his imprisonment on charges of “violating public modesty” for an excerpt from the Egyptian edition of Using Life, published in Akhbar al-Adab. University of Texas Press is releasing the English translation, by Ben Koerber, November 20. More about Naji’s ongoing trial from PEN America.Magdy al-Shafee’s Metro was first published in January 2008 and quickly banned on the ground of “offending public morals”; al-Shafee and his publisher were both fined. An English translation by Chip Rosetti was published in June 2012, and the book—in English and Arabic—is now available in Egypt again.  The winner of the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, in the Young Adult category, was Fatima Sharafeddine’s Cappuccino. Yasmina Jraissati can be contacted about translation rights. There were several other fantastic shortlisted works, including Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird and Taghreed Najjar’s One Day the Sun Will Shine. Thursday’s Visitors by Saudi novelist Badriya Albeshr was the target of trolls and then a banning in Saudi Arabia. You can read an excerpt at ArabLit.Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who has been in prison or under house arrest for more than two years for a poem, has her next trial date November 9. You can follow her case at freedareentatour.org/trial. The poem, which is alleged to be incitement, is "Resist, My People, Resist Them." Books mentioned in this podcast The Apartment in Bab El-Louk $14.95 By Donia Maher Using Life $16.34 By Ahmed Naji Metro: A Story of Cairo $4.54 By Magdy El Shafee Children of the Alley: A Novel $13.66 By Naguib Mahfouz The Yacoubian Building: A Novel $8.11 By Alaa Al Aswany   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Twenty years after the disastrous and mendacious US invasion of Iraq, we take a look at writing from Iraq: memoirs, poems and blog posts. Shalash the Iraqi is a collection of such posts – a satirical, surreal, and affecting panorama in life in a Shia suburb of Baghdad in the early years of the occupation. Show Notes:An excerpt from Gaith Abdul-ahad’s memoir A Stranger In Your Own City ran recently in the GuardianShalash The Iraqi, trans. Luke Leafgren, is a collection of blog posts written in 2005-2006 An excerpt from Faleeha Hassan’s memoir War and Me, tans. William Hutchins ran on Arablit.org.The Book of Trivialities, by Majed Mujid, trans. Kareem James Abu-ZeidThe only English-language collection of Sargon Boulous’ self-translated poetry is Knife Sharpener from Banipal Books. You can find a list of his poems available online here. You can make a donation to support BULAQ's 2023 season here: https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We wandered through Arabic poetry and prose to talk about many different forms of literary love: regretful love, unreciprocated love, bad love, vengeful love, liberating love, married love. We read this poem by Núra al-Hawshán: “O eyes, pour me the clearest, freshest tearsAnd when the fresh part’s over, pour me the dregs.O eyes, gaze at his harvest and guard it.Keep watch upon his water-camels, look at his well.If he passes me on the roadI can’t speak to him.O God, such afflictionAnd utter calamity!Whoever desires usWe scorn to desire,And whom we desireFeeble fate does not deliver.”The Núra al-Hawshán poem, translated by Moneera al-Ghadeer, has a modern musical adaptation on YouTube produced by Majed Al Esa.Yasmine Seale’s translation of Ulayya Bint El Mahdi. This poem and others were set to music on the album “Medieval Femme.”Do’a al-Karawan (“The Nightingale’s Prayer”) by Taha HusseinI Do Not Sleep, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, trans. Jonathan SmolinThe Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57)Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door) Latifa al-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth (1960) All That I Want to Forget, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Michele Henjum.Rita and the Rifle, Mahmoud Darwish, made into a song by Marcel Khalife. Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s literary prize season! When the Sawiris Cultural Awards were announced at the start of 2023, novelist Shady Lewis Botros turned his novel award down, launching a storm of criticism, defense, and discussion. Is it bad manners or good politics to turn down a prize? How do different prizes affect the literary landscape? How is the 2023 prize season shaping up?Show Notes: Mada Masr published “A conversation with Shady Lewis Botros on the genealogy of literary refusal”The International Prize for Arabic Fiction recently announced their 2023 longlist, with a historically high number of women writers (half).Also in Jan 2023, Banipal Prize judges announced that two novels had won their 2022 prize. By coincidence, we did a joint episode on those two novels.PEN America recently announced their lit-prize longlists. Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell, made the poetry-in-translation longlist.In December 2022, Fatima Qandil’s Empty Cages won the Naguib Mahfouz medal, and she said it was the first time she’d won a prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Egyptian graphic novelist Deena Mohamed talks about her debut urban-fantasy trilogy Shubeik Lubeik (“Your Wish is My Command”). A product of playful self-translation, it’s coming to English as a single volume. It will be unbottled by Pantheon (US) and Granta (UK) on January 10, 2023. Show Notes: While the US edition keeps the title “Shubeik Lubeik,” the UK edition will use a literal translation: “Your Wish Is My Command.”Find more of Deena’s work at http://deenadraws.art and on Twitter and Instagram as @itsdeenasaur.The Arabic originals were published by Dar Mahrousa and are available in the US through Maamoul Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

El-Rifae’s book Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution tells the story of a movement that mobilized in Egypt to protect female protesters from mob sexual attacks in 2012 and 2013. Based on interviews with friends and comrades, the book explores memory, truth, gender, violence, political organizing, trauma, and possible futures.Show NotesYou can order the book directly from @VersoBooks.Read an excerpt at Granta.The book launches October 24 in New York City; there will also be events in Philadelphia and D.C. Follow Yasmin for updates about more events at @yasminelrifae.More writing by Yasmin El-Rifae is available on Mada Masr. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this sponsored episode, we talk to Sheikh Zayed Book Award winner Dr. Muhsin Al-Musawi about his life-long scholarship on the 1001 Nights. Show Notes:This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.Today’s guest, Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2022 in the category of “Arab Culture in Other Languages,” for his book “The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures.” Al-Musawi is a professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University. He is the author of 39 books and the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.aeProfessor Al-Musawi’s biography and a description of his book can be found on the SZBA website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re back to talk about books we read over the summer and books we’re looking forward to this fall. Including poetry from Iman Mersal, Hadiya Hussein’s novel about looking for a lover disappeared in Saddam’s Iraq, and Mohamed Alnaas’ novel about the pressure to be a certain type of Libyan man. Show Notes:Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, trans. Robyn Creswell, is a selection from four of her poetry collections, forthcoming from McMillan. Hadiya Hussein’s Waiting For The Past, trans. Barbara Romaine, is forthcoming from Syracuse Press. Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table, by Mohamed Alnaas, won the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Aziz Muhammad’s The Critical Case of a Man Named K, an unnamed narrator is diagnosed with leukemia. His 40-week journal, shaped by his readings of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, sarcastically and movingly documents his alienation from his body, his surroundings and even, eventually, from books.Show Notes: An interview with translator Humphrey Davies.We also talked about a few other works where protagonists are diagnosed with cancer:Shahla Ujayli’s A Sky So Close to Us, translated by Michelle Hartman (Interlink Books); Radwa Ashour’s Heavier than Radwa (Dar Al Shorouk), although this is a memoir; Haifa al-Bitar’s A Woman of This Modern Age (Dar Saqi); Hassan Daoud’s No Road to Paradise, translated by Marilyn Booth (Hoopoe Fiction).We also mention some Saudi books that have won awards or attracted international attention, such as Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea and The Dove’s Necklace by Raja Alem. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An earthquake inspired Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Agadir, published in French in 1967 and translated to English by Jake Syersack and Pierre Joris. Part playtext, part novel, part political essay, part poem, this insurrection of a book takes as its starting point the devastating 1960 earthquake that struck the Moroccan city. Show Notes: We also talked about a few recently published and forthcoming poetry collections.Mohamed Stitou’s Two Half Faces, translated by David Colmer (Phoneme Media)Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for This Unseen Thread, translated by Mona Kareem (Ugly Duckling Presse)Ibn Arabi’s The Translator of Desires, translated by Michael Sells (Princeton University Press)Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave The Thousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age. Show NotesYou can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travels on the Library of Arabic Literature website.You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.You can read Yasmine Seale’s stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An Interview with Maria Dadouch, who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature this year. Dadouch’s book The Mystery of the Glass ball features two children becoming friends, fighting villains and protecting nature on a train ride in the near future. We talked about the need for more Arabic YA books; contemporary sci-fi; literary prizes; digital publishing and why writing for teenagers is the hardest thing to do.  This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.Today’s guest, Maria Dadouch, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2022 in the category of Children’s Literature, for her novel لغز الكورة الزجاجية or "The Mystery of the Glass Ball." Dadouche is a screenwriter and children’s author from Syria who has published over 50 books. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.aeYou can find some of Dadouch’s many childrens’ books in Arabic here.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.”Show NotesMaya Abu Al-Hayyat’s You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is out from Milkweed EditionsNajwan Darwish’s Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books. Fady Joudah curated The Baffler’s series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh’s Reflection. We read Fady Joudah’s poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars. And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guest hosts Rafael (age 11) and Milo (almost 10) take over this episode of Bulaq to talk about the evil aunts, time-traveling djinn, and scary checkpoints in the first book of Palestinian novelist Sonia Nimr's fast-paced fantasy trilogy: Thunderbird.Show NotesThe first Thunderbird novel is available from University of Texas Press. The second is forthcoming this fall.Educators interested in joining a launch event on Zoom with author and translator can sign up at the University of Texas website. Participants will get a free copy of the book!Red Stars, by Davide Morosinottto, is available in Denise Muir's translation. You can find more about literature for young readers in translation at worldkidlit.wordpress.com.Rafael's next editing project is Sawad Hussain's translation of Djamila Morani's The Djinn's Apple, forthcoming from Neem Tree. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another of our short book-quiz episodes. One of our astute listeners has given the answer to last week's question: What Koranic and Biblical story is a reference for Abdulrazak Gurnah's “Paradise”? The answer to this week's question is within the Moroccan novel “Hot Maroc” — and our last episode about it. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Translator Alexander E. Elinson joins us to discuss Yassin Adnan's Hot Maroc, a sprawling satire of contemporary Morocco. The novel, set in Marrakesh and online, follows the story of Rahhal Laouina, aka “The Squirrel,” who finds his voice as an anonymous internet troll – and then has it co-opted by the country's security apparatus. While it paints a bleak picture of the possibilities of political dialogue, journalism, and self-expression, the novel itself is testament to literature's ability to chart new imaginative territory.Show NotesHot Maroc is available from Syracuse University Press in Alex Elinson's translationYou can read an excerpt of the novel at Asymptote.Aida Alami contextualizes the novel at Middle East Eye.Adnan talks about the inspiration for the novel in an interview with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Here we give the answer to a question about an island that was part of a Sultanate spanning Oman and East Africa, and that features in our last two episodes. And we ask about a Koranic and Biblical story that is a reference for Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paradise, by 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, is the coming-of-age story of Yusuf, a Tanzanian boy sent into debt servitude when his father can't pay back an Arab merchant. Yusuf travels into the interior with “Uncle Aziz” and other vivid characters, to trade with the “savages” there. The story takes place on the cusp of World War I, set in the wake of mass enslavement and the advent of European colonialism and interwoven with Yusuf's story from the Quran. Gurnah himself belonged to the Arab elite of Zanzibar, and fled to the UK after a revolution there in the 1960s.Show NotesIn Episode 84, we discussed the colonial relationship between Oman and East Africa in Jokha Alharthi's The Bitter Orange Tree. Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel lectureExcerpt on Kilwa from Ibn Battuta's RihlatTanzania-Oman Historic Ties: The Past and Present, by Oswald Masebo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Here we give the answer to a question about an Arab poet who emigrated to the US and translated some of the Beat poets. And we ask a question about Oman, where Jokha Alharthi's “Bitter Orange Tree,” discussed in our last episode, is set. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jokha Alharthi burst to sudden international literary stardom in 2019, when her second novel, Sayyidat al-Qamr (tr. Marilyn Booth as Celestial Bodies), won the International Booker. The novel, touted as the “first by an Omani woman to be translated to English,” has since appeared in languages around the world. More novels by Omani women, including Bushra Khalfan's The Garden, are forthcoming in English translation, and Alharthi's Narinja (also tr. Booth, as Bitter Orange Tree) will appear in May 2022. In this episode, we talk Omani literature, history, translation, and the extraordinary Bitter Orange Tree.Show NotesSix Languages, Six Covers: Celestial Bodies Around the WorldOn Turning ‘Sayyidat al-Qamr' into ‘Celestial Bodies' and the Tyranny of the NewNew Yorker review: An Omani Novel Exposes Marriage and Its MiseriesExcerpt of Celestial Bodies on WWB: LondonExcerpt of Bitter Orange Tree on Carnegie Foundation website: Al-RahmaInterview with Jokha AlharthiMore at Alharthi's website, jokha.comOur episode on Sonallah Ibrahim's novel Warda, also set in Oman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. We give the answer to the question from Episode 82: “The Men Who Swallowed the Sun,” which features Bedouin migration from Egypt to Libya. In our last episode with guest Mona Kareem we talked about self-translation and “writing in Arabic in the US” and our next question is about a writer who did just this. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mona Kareem's essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” lit up debates among translators and poets. In this episode Kareem talks about poetry, the power dynamics of translation, and the relationship of both to migration, exile, self-censorship, and publication. She also reads from her poetry, both in her own translation and in translation by poet @SaraFarag.Essays by Mona KareemWestern Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations Bidoon: A Cause and Its Literature Are Born  Mapping Exile: A Writer's Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War KuwaitSelf-translation Never LandsPoetry by Mona KareemEleven poems on Poetry International Three poems in The Brooklyn RailMore at Mona's website, monakareem.blogspot.com/search/label/PoetryAhmed Naji's essay Taming the Immigrant: Musings of a Writer in Exile  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. We give the answer to the question from Episode 81, “Naguib Mahfouz's Banned Book” and a new challenge for listeners, regarding one of the books we discussed in Episode 82: “The Men Who Swallowed the Sun,” which features Bedouin migration from Egypt to Libya. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two very different Egyptian novels – Hamdi Abu Golayyel's The Men Who Swallowed the Sun and Mohamed Kheir's Slipping – both circle around issues of migration in different ways. Abu Golayyel's Men (originally The Rise and Fall of the Saad Shin), translated by Humphrey Davies, is an anti-epic epic told in a rough, powerful storyteller's voice, following men as they move from Egypt to Libya and Italy. Mohamed Kheir's Slipping, translated by Robin Moger, is a beautifully crafted sonic landscape of appearances and disappearances.Show NotesAn excerpt of The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is available at the Hoopoe Fiction website.“The practice and culture of smuggling in the borderland of Egypt and Libya,” by Thomas Hüsken, is available on the Chatham House website.An excerpt of Slipping appeared at LitHub.Abu Bakr Khaal's novel African Titanics, translated to English by Charis Bredon, is available from Dar al-Saqi and Darf Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from Episode 80, “Just Different: Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf” and a new challenge for listeners, regarding the subject of Episode 81, Nabuig Mahfouz. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What was so controversial about Children of the Alley, leading to it being banned for years in Egypt and to an attempt on the author's life? How and when was it published, criticized, understood? Mohamed Shoair delves into all of this in his literary investigation The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz's Children Of The Alley (trans. Humphrey Davies). It's a study of literary censorship and of the fight between artistic expression and religious and political authority in Egypt from the 1950s through today. The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley will be available soon from AUC Press. An excerpt is available at the AUC Press website, as is the book's table of contents. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from Episode 79, "Not Yet Defeated," and a new challenge for listeners around our Episode 80 focus, Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf. After you've listened, send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

She was an outsider, an experimenter, a “rebel realist” and a feminist. You may not have read the short stories of Malika Moustadraf (1969-2006), since her work fell out of print after her untimely death. But tales of Moustadraf's fierce talent never stopped circulating, and now her work is back in print in Arabic and also set to appear in Alice Guthrie's English translation.The US and UK editions of this collection have different titles. The US edition of Moustadraf's stories, Blood Feast, is out from The Feminist Press, while the UK edition, Something Strange, Like Hunger, is out from Saqi Books.There is also an audiobook, narrated by Amin El Gamal and Lameece Issaq.We talk about another important Moroccan author whose work was in danger of falling out of circulation, Ahmed Bouanani, in an earlier episode: Writing to Remember.The Arabic re-issue of the collection, which includes the late stories, is available from  منشورات الربيع, available online from a number of retailers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Egypt's January 25 revolution was 11 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. We look at writing that remembers and resists. Alaa Abd El-Fattah's You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was translated by a collective, and is out from Fizcarraldo Editions in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming in March 2022 from Seven Stories Press. There is also an Italian translation by Monica Ruocco.Ahmed Douma's second poetry collection, Curly, was set for release in September 2021 by Dar Maraya. But on the eve of its publication, state security officials confiscated copies of the book. Read Elliott Colla and Ahmed Hassan's co-translations of a poem from this collection, and an excerpt from Douma's “Blasphemy,” on ArabLit. Basma Abdelaziz's Here is a Body, which chronicles the Rabaa massacre and its aftermath, was published in Jonathan Wright's translation by Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an excerpt on the Hoopoe website.Also, join our #bulaqbookquiz for a chance to win a release from one of ten participating publishers. Send your answers to bulaq@sowt.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine's administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that isn't real, to many writers.”Show Notes: Book of Ramallah, edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat, is available from Comma Press. You can read “Love in Ramallah” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Mohammed Ghalaieny, at Bookanista. An excerpt from the introduction is available at The Irish Times.An excerpt of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah, in Ahdaf Soueif's translation, is available at Penguin Random.An except of Raja Shehaheh's Palestinian Walks is available through PBS.“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by Nathan Thrall, is at the New York Review.The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, is streaming on Netflix. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Raph Cormack is author of Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring ‘20s, which chronicles the lives of many of Egypt's biggest stars of the early twentieth century. Show Notes: The Amar Foundation has an archive of Mounira al-Mahdiyya songs such as the one we end the show with, "اسمع اغاني المهدية"  Raph also wrote about “Queer Life in Cairo in the 1920s” for the Gay and Lesbian Review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter.  You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube. You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale,  in World Literature Today. At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15.Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For our end-of-year book list, we made up our own categories -- from “best poet I hadn't heard of before” ” to “best book about cannibalism” to “best book that lived up to the hype” -- and added a few more along the way. It's a journey through 10 books that struck us and stayed with us this year. Show NotesBest literary cookbook for children (MLQ): Arab Fairy Tale Feasts, Karim al-Rawi, ill. Nahid Kazemi. Read the review by Marcia and her 10-year-old.Best book I've been waiting for years to see published (Ursula): Ahmed Bouanani's La Septieme Porte, a history of Moroccan cinema from 1907 to 1986. Bouanani was a writer, poet and film-maker who was censored and blacklisted; the manuscript of this book was nearly destroyed in a fire, and was painstakingly put back together by his daughter, Touda Bouanani. Best collection of poetry by a poet previously unknown to me (MLQ): Except for This Unseen Thread, Ra'ad Abdulqadir, tr. Mona Kareem, published by Ugly Duckling PresseBest book I'm reading even if I haven't gotten far (Ursula): Ahmed Naji's prison memoir حرز مكمكم; read an excerpt in English translation at the University of Michigan website, translated by Khaled Mattawa.Best book about cannibalism (MLQ):  Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, ed. & tr. Tim Mackintosh SmithBest book I've ordered someone for Christmas (Ursula): The Annotated Arabian Nights, ed. Paulo Lemos Horta, tr. Yasmine SealeBest gift book for under $20 (MLQ): Midnight in Cairo, by Raphael Cormack, which reminded Marcia of Zeinab Zaza's “يتامى الإسكندرية,” a historical police procedural set in 1930s Alexandria that focuses on the precarious lives of women.  Best book that actually lived up to the hype (Ursula): The Book of Sleep, by Haytham al-Wardani, translated by Robin Moger. BONUS CATEGORY: Best Arabic-language list in translation in 2021, Seagull BooksBest introduction to a novel (MLQ): Balqis Sharara's introduction to the re-issue of her late sister Hayat Sharara's When Darkness Falls. You can read it, tr. Hend Saeed, on ArabLit.Best book about the “Syrian refugee crisis” (Ursula): The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine We also say goodbye to Humphrey Davies (1947-2021). There is a digital memorial in progress at arablit.org/humphrey/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave The Thousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age. Show NotesYou can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travels on the Library of Arabic Literature website.You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta's Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.You can read Yasmine Seale's stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We look at new writing from Syria and about the experiences of Syrian refugees, including Ramy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die, a book he categorizes not as poetry or prose but as “pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag.”Show NotesRamy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die was translated by Isis Nusair and edited by Levi Thompson.Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay was translated by Leri Price and is on the shortlist for this year's National Book Award, in the Translation category.Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope follows a Lebanese-American trans woman's journey to the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece.Haya Saleh's Wild Poppies won the 2020 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature in the YA category and follows two young Syrian boys, Omar and Sufyan, as they struggle to come-of-age during wartime.We finished on a reading of an untitled poem by Ramy Al-Asheq, published in Transference, translated by Levi Thompson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.”Show NotesIn Palestine these days, the olive harvest is under assault from Israeli settlers. Six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil socierty NGOs have just been designated terrorist organizations. Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is forthcoming from Milkweed EditionsNajwan Darwish's Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books. Fady Joudah curated The Baffler's series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh's Reflection. We read Fady Joudah's poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars. And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers. Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women's Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire. The Radical Books Collective and the Adabiyat Book Club are holding an online master class on El Saadawy's famous novel Woman At Point Zero on November 20, with academic and translator Samah Selim. Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sonallah Ibrahim's Warda is the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim's most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.” Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela's translation, from Yale University Press.Hosam also writes about Warda in his Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens.Hosam's translation of Sonallah Ibrahim's Stealth is available from New Directions.Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in Tony Calderbank's translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.Hosam Aboul-ela is also the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. One of the first books it published was The Stillborn by Arwa Salih. Forthcoming titles include Salim Barakat's Come, Take a Gentle Stab, co-translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen; Akram Musallam's The Dance of the Deep-blue Scorpion, translated by Sawad Hussain, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Blossoms, translated by Ibrahim Muwahi. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Football and Arabic literature haven't always had an easy relationship. Football has inspired famous authors like Mahmoud Darwish, and anonymous fans who have composed powerful stadium chants. But the sport is sometimes looked down on by writers. We celebrate the sport and its chroniclers, featured in the FOOTBALL-themed fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.SHOW NOTESToday, we talk our way through the Fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which is all about literature and football. We open with a chant from the Casablanca team RAJA, “Fi bladi delmouni,” or “I Was Wronged in My Own Country,” in the original and then translated by Hicham Rafik.For more background, read Aida Alami's “The Soccer Politics of Morocco,” in The New York Review of Books.We go out on the Ultras Ahlawy chant “Hekayetna,” or “Our Story,” translated by Mina Ibrahim.We also talk about Mina Ibrahim's moving essay “Egyptian Football's Missing Archives.”Mid-way, we read from Syrian author Luqman Derky's “Knocking on Blue Freedom's Door,” translated by Daniel Behar.You can find the issue at arablit.org/store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back! Catch up on everything you missed over the summer, including Women in Translation Month and a Fall reading list full of intriguing new titles. Show Notes: In our opening, Marcia reads "Four Years Without You" (For Mahmoud Darwish) by Samar Abdel Jabar, trans. Zeina Hashem BeckAugust was Women in Translation Month with ArabLit highlighting Arab women authors you may not have heard of yet. The Female Voices in Arabic Literature webinar featured writer Iman Mersal, translator Sawad Hussain and scholar Dr. Marlé Hammond. Melanie Magidow's translation of a (small portion) of the epic poem of Dhat al-Himma is out from Penguin Press as The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman. Warda, by Sonallah Ibrahim, trans. Hosam Abul-Ela, is out from Yale University PressSlipping, by Mohamed Kheir, trans. Robin Moger, was published in June by Two Lines Press. The Library of Arabic Literature is behind the bilingual edition of Hanna Diyab's Books of Travels (trans. Elias Muhanna) and al-Baghdadi's A Physician on the Nile (trans.. Tim Mackintosh-Smith). Diyab is the source of some of the stories Antoine Galland added to his version of the 1001 Nights, including the story Aladdin. Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay (trans. Leri Price) is forthcoming from World Editions. The Egyptian writer Basma Abdel Aziz's 2016 novel The Queue (trans. Lissie Jacquette) was a widely praised work of dark political fantasy. Her follow-up, tr. Jonathan Wright, is Here Is A Body.Ursula's article on Edward Said -- on his own account of his life and those of others, including a recent biography -- can be found at The Point.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iman Mersal's work spans poetry and scholarship, personal essay and biography. In 2021, Mersal received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her deeply insightful prose work In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat. SHOW NOTESThis podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world's most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.Today, we talk with SZBA-winning Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal. In 1993, Mersal picked up an unknown novel by a forgotten writer from the 60s. And so began her long wanderings in search of Enayat El Zayat. El Zayat killed herself in 1963, four years before her book “Love and Silence” was finally published. Mersal's portrait of El Zayat is a remarkable work of research, empathy and imagination. Iman Mersal's In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat (في أثر عنايات الزيات) was published by Kotob Khan Books in late 2019. We read excerpts from Robin Moger's forthcoming English translation. You can also listen to our previous episode on this book, titled “Cold Trail.”Richard Jacquemond's translation, Sur les traces d'Enayat Zayyat, was published in the spring of 2021.The only novel by Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-63), Love and Silence ‫(الحب و الصمت) ,‬ was recently republished and is available on Google Play.Other works in English translation by Iman Mersal include How to Mend: Motherhood And Its Ghosts, tr. Robin Moger and a forthcoming poetry collection, translated by Robyn Creswell. ArabLit has gathered links to poems by Mersal in English translation. Her co-translation of Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club (بيرة فى نادى البلياردو) is widely available.You can read “Qāl wa Qulnā: What the Letter Qāf means in Spoken Jordanian” on 7iber. Mersal's “The Displaced Voice” is available via Scribd. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Maqamat of Al-Hariri is a story collection from 11th century Iraq that showcases the Arabic language's dazzling, disorienting possibilities. Michael Cooperson received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his ground-breaking translation. SHOW NOTESThis podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world's most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.Today's guest, Michael Cooperson was awarded the SZBA in 2021 in the category of Translation, for the book Impostures: A Rogue's Tale Translated Fifty Ways by Al-Hariri, translated from Arabic to English and published by the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children's Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website: https://www.zayedaward.ae/en/translation.grant.aspx. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode focuses on Driss Chraibi's The Simple Past (Le Passé Simple), a Moroccan novel about a very angry young man in revolt against his father's tyranny and the hypocrisies of his colonial education. Back in 1954, it was compared to an explosion – and it still packs a punch today. Show Notes:The Simple Past was newly re-issued from NYRB Classics in Hugh A. Harter's 1990 translation, with a new introduction from Adam Shatz. Shatz's introduction is available online at the NYR Daily.Excerpts from Chraibi's interview with Federico Arbós can be found at Fragmentos de la entrevista con Federico Arbós, El Mundo/La Esfera, 28/3/92.This episode also references Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy and the father figure of Si Sayyed; Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club; and Tayib Saleh's Season of Migration to the North. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We recorded this episode in Cairo with author, translator, and Mada Masr culture editor Yasmine Zohdi. We talked about making art in difficult and precarious times; how to acknowledge the political context; censorship and self-censorship. “What we talk about when we talk about trees,” by Yasmine Zohdi, ran in Mada Masr in December of last year.We also spoke about the shrinking of cultural spaces in Cairo.Zohdi also translates, including her husband Muhammad al-Hajj's beautiful Nobody Mourns the City's Cats.MLQ was in Cairo for the ARCE symposium on popular culture. Essays from and inspired by the symposium will be appearing at The Maydan.An excerpt of the Egyptian novel Prizes for Heroes was translated as part of Mada Masr's translation series.The Egyptian film Yomeddine (“Judgement Day”) was part of the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we talk about how MLQ's latest passion project, the Arab Lit Quarterly, and the ups and downs of making a living (sort of) writing about books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.