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“After his father died, they found an old English biscuit tin at the bottom of the wardrobe. What lay inside it puzzled him greatly.”

Published by Dar al-Shorouk in January 2026, Ahmed ʿAbd al-Manʿam Ramadan’s novel “في مدينة الذباب” (In the City of Flies) presents a dystopian vision of a future city overwhelmed by accumulating rubbish and swarms of flies.

The title here is borrowed from the French edition, Un goût de thé amer, which was translated by Sarah Rolfo, while the Arabic original is titled العراك في جهنم. This satirical novella is set in a Libyan village called Hell and is a retelling of events our narrator claims took place there in the 1990s.

Amer Badran is Palestinian poet and doctor. He has six poetry collections.

“So we open our mouths, / not to scream, / but to release the silence.”

There are events around the world this September 25-27 celebrating the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, after the Arab World Institute and Centre Pompidou declared September 25 to be “Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day.”

“We’re creating a space where Palestinian artists are not required to do or be anything other than themselves, and there’s no pressure to ‘represent’ or do anything other than share their artistic practice, we’re not looking for answers, we want to create shared space, which what theatre in its essential form.”

“Before I loved poems, I loved language. As a child I thought many times about inventing a new language and teaching it to the children my age, so that all of us could slip out of the world’s language in a way of our own. It was a childish, almost primal tenderness for words, and I still feel it in me.”

This episode of the BULAQ podcast asks: What has changed in the last twenty years in Arabic literature, publishing and translation? What has not?

” Jaziri wrote poetry with one set of alphabets which at that time were used in four languages: Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Sometimes, he used the four languages in one couplet. His poems are still recited and sung by Kurds. That coexistence of languages was quite natural, the alluring music was convincing, although I sometimes understood almost nothing.”

“In Ways of the Lord, Christians are mistaken for being Jews and are accused of spying for Israel, which demonstrates the lack of recognition of Copts and their conflation with other minorities.”

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”