Sarah Enany is a Banipal Prize-winning literary translator (for her translation of Rasha Adly’s The Girl with Braided Hair) and a professor in the English Department of Cairo University. She has translated several operas including the acclaimed sung versions of Les Miserables and Mozart’s The Magic Flute into Egyptian Arabic, as well as Sayed Higab’s libretto for the opera Miramar into English. She is also the Arabic–>English translator of Witness to War and Peace: Egypt, the October War, and Beyond, The Book Smuggler, and the Jewish Muslim trilogy (all AUC Press). She spoke with us about ..read more

As this is a novelette, some readers may prefer to read on a tablet, in PDF or epub form. It’s available free on the ArabLit store. Holy Wednesday By Mahmoud Aboudoma Translated by Sarah Enany “I saw them split open your chest and pull out your heart. I saw your blood flow into the dirt; I saw them recite the prayers for the dead over you; I saw them write the story of your absence on your heart; I saw them perfume your body, wipe it down with rose-oil and henna; I saw them cover your body with salt and linen, pillowing you in the dust; I saw them build the wall of the burial chamber between ..read more

Copies of ArabLit Quarterly’s Spring 2024 issue are available for sale through our Gumroad store, at Amazon, and in select bookshops. As always, if you need a free e-copy, email us at info@arablit.org. All profits from this magazine go to our Gaza partners at Majalla 28. Also: Look for more about a launch event on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Mohammed and Mahmoud will be there if at all possible. In this special spring issue, ArabLit Quarterly and Gaza’s Majalla 28 come together to publish words and art from Gaza. In the face of immense death and loss, the brutal and inhumane destruction of cultur ..read more

By Graham Liddell Words fail spectacularly in the shadow of 2,000 pound bombs. Palestinian author Anton Shammas recently described his own incapacity to respond in writing to the slaughter and starvation in Gaza, feeling overwhelmed by rage and “the paralyzing realization that whatever I write will not save a single Gazan child.” Indeed, the sheer number of children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza is devastating beyond words — at least 13,000 children in the first six months of the war, a rate of more than 70 per day. But somehow I am even more dumbfounded by the countless stories of child ..read more

Tugrul Mende, in conversation with Fadi Azzam and Ghada Alatrash In April, Interlink Books published Fadi Azzam’s Huddud’s House—which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction back in 2018—in Dr. Ghada Alatrash’s English translation. As Kirkus notes in their starred review, “Huddud’s house is a real place in Azzam’s elegantly unfolding story, a ramshackle maze containing 170,000 Arabic books and 12,000 manuscripts.“ The house enters the picture when Dr. Anees returns to Syria in 2011, at the dawn of the revolution, to the family home, which was left to him by h ..read more

The group Passages Through Genocide (gazapassages.com) collects, translates and publishes texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza, to lift up their words. You can read more about them in this interview with ArabLit. These videos — sharing the words of Hiba Abu Nada, Nour Swirki, Ebraheem Matar, and Noor Aldeen Hajjaj — were produced by KOMET KASHAKEEL (kometkashakeel.com). You can find all the videos on our YouTube channel ..read more

Last week, we shared an excerpt from Iraqi author Duna Ghali’s acclaimed novel Orbits of Lonelinessin maia tabet’s translation. This week, Duna talks with us about the differing receptions of work by men and women, in Danish and in Arabic, how literary translation feeds her writing, and how sometimes nowhere is the right place to write. In your thoughtful and sometimes very funny essay, “On Dictatorship, Language, and Women,” you discuss — among other things —  the differing approaches of men and women writers: word choice, crafting sex scenes. You briefly toy with the idea of, like Kar ..read more

This list may not be complete; if you have something to add, please put it in the comments or email us at info@arablit.org. At Rest in the Cherry Orchard, by Azher Jirjees, tr. Jonathan Wright (Banipal Books) From the publisher: Said Mardan flees Iraq when a colleague reports him for a joke about Saddam Hussein. He obtains asylum in Norway, learns the language, and becomes a postman. He marries his Norwegian language teacher Tona, even adopts her family name Jensen, and starts writing satirical stories in Norwegian for the Dagposten newspaper. However, he suffers throughout from all too vivid ..read more

By Samira Meghdessian The importance of historiography lies in ensuring a continuity between past and present, even as bombs erase everything that has been built, as we have witnessed recently in Gaza, or as homes are destroyed and families evicted, as in cities and villages across historic Palestine. Ramallah is not the oldest of Palestinian cities. In her introduction to The Book of Ramallah, author Maya Abu al-Hayyat describes it as “a seemingly modest city with a short and relatively peaceful history, it is a city of ordinary stories, rather than heroic myths” that has remained “stoical ..read more

A few years ago, when we asked Egyptian novelist Miral al-Tahawy for a favorite book in Arabic by a woman writer, she said, “Truth is, there is a long list of Arab women’s work that I’m sure was important in the history of my reading, but what I remember is the last text I read that had a profound impact on me, and that’s Duna Ghali’s Orbits of Loneliness (منازل الوحشة), a novel that tells about the narrator’s relationship to her young child during a time of war and siege in Iraq, both before and after the US military invasion. The novel describes the complex relationship between a mother and ..read more