Joumana Haddad is a poet, the administrator of the Arabic Booker prize, and this year’s winner of the Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Prize. You can read a number of her poems online.
Adania Shibli. If you google Adania Shibli, you will surely come across Ahdaf Souief’s quote that Shibli’s: “the most talked-about writer on the West Bank.” Her Touch has just come out from Clockroot books. While I’m not to speak about this lovely novella before my review appears, I suppose I can tell you to go out and buy it.
Youssef Rakha is a poet and journalist who maintains the blog Arabophile. I believe he’s also working on a novel. You can read some of his work on his blog.
Abdellah Taia is an openly gay Moroccan writer; his Salvation Army is available in English. I have a review of a review of it here.
Faïza Guène is a young French-Algerian writer whose first novel was published at the age of 19; the novel is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman in Paris’s deprived suburbs, and was an instant publishing sensation. She talks with The Guardian about her struggles with Parisian racism.
Randa Jarrar is the author of A Map of Home, a coming-of-age novel about a girl with a Palestinian father and an Egyptian-Greek mother who grows up in Kuwait, Egypt, and Texas. Jarrar also translates. Among those she translates: Adania Shibli.