NEA Translation Grants to ‘Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts’

The United States’ National Endowment for the Arts announced that they had awarded 16 grants, worth $250,000, for translation projects, including a $25,000 grant for Mohammed A. Albakry to translate Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts from the Egyptian Revolution:

Albakry, of Middle Tennessee State University, plans to translate an anthology of six contemporary Egyptian plays written by established and emerging playwrights. According to the NEA release, he will work in collaboration with Rebekah Maggor.

Maggor received her MFA through the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University, her BA from Columbia University, and studied Arabic at Alexandria University in Egypt. She directs the project “Voices of Protest: Middle Eastern Theatre in Translation.” Her first full-length play, Two Days at Home Three Days in Prison, explores the challenges of a young woman soldier assigned to work as a prison guard in an Israeli military prison.

Together with Albakry, she translated Ibrahim El-Husseini’s Comedy of Sorrows, about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, and directed readings of the play at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the Segal Theatre Center in New York, and Vanderbilt University.

Other recipients include Erdağ Göknar, who will translate the epic poem Insurgency by Nazim Hikmet and Nancy Naomi Carlson, who’s set to translate a poetry collection by Abdourahman Waberi.

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