Sheikh Zayed Book Award’s 2026 Shortlists
From Reham Al-Saba’s ‘I Am at Your Door’
Fiction
From Reham Al-Saba’s ‘I Am at Your Door’
I Am at Your Door was written as a last resort for survival, as another form of life. In its pages, we read: “Is there anything more beautiful than writing while you are being exterminated? And here, I mean the ugly meaning of beauty.”
Part Three, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’
Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.
Part Two, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’
Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 16, 2026.
Poetry
From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’
Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”
‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah
The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.
Three Poems by Nima Hasan
“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”
Interviews
Said Khatibi and the Algerian Crime Novel
Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.
On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Will Tamplin has devoted much of his work in translation to sharing the literary world of the exceptionally complex Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this interview, Tamplin explores his motivation behind this continuous dedication to Jabra’s work, as he dives into his experience translating The Other Rooms.
Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Zia Ahmed discuss approaching Arabic translation via English and Urdu, the layers of “outsider-ness” in translation, and the boom of narrative fiction in Oman.
In Focus
From the archives
Another Road for Syrian Poetry
“The divide among poets has added a diaspora to the spatial diaspora, which scattered Syrians around the world.”
Authors, Scholars, and Translators Look Back: On Radwa Ashour’s ‘Granada’
‘Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song’
