A number of you have asked about this. So, if you’re in Cairo, “The International Media Network Services for Human Rights (IMNS4HR, Sweden) and Townhouse, Cairo have joined efforts to offer The Arabic Digital Book Expression Program, a series of workshops focusing on creating Arabic digital books.”
The fierce conflict over Syria’s future, which began with great hopes in the spring of 2011, has battered the country’s publishing industry.
Last month, a report on al-Jazeera announced that “A ‘new poetry’ emerges from Syria’s civil war.” I, like many others, read it with equal parts curiosity and puzzlement.
The “Museum of Words” has announced the winners of this year’s international flash-fiction competition, which accepts stories in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. Young Egyptian novelist Tareq Imam (@tareqimam1) won the Arabic category with his short-short “An Eye.”
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab is one of the most important names in modern Iraqi poetry — and indeed modern Arabic poetry. The poet, who died in 1964 at just 38, shook the poetic world with his verse. Translator, scholar, and author Dr. Issa Boullata, whose PhD dissertation became a book on al-Sayyab, answered a few questions about the poet’s life and work.
One of the Syrian novelist Haidar Haidar’s most important works — and certainly his most controversial — A Banquet for Seaweed — is nearing the end of a long translational journey with scholar-translator Allen Hibbard and poet-translator-publisher Osama Esber.
Last week, Mohga Hassib attended one of AUC’s Center for Translation Studies lectures. Dr. Tahia Abdel Nasser talked about “Translations of Nasser: Between the Pulic and the Private.”
Today at 7pm, City Lore’s Director of Poetry Programs Catherine Fletcher moderates a panel dedicated to the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project. Poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay, Iraqi-American poet Alise Alousi, poet and project founder Beau Beausoleil, and ArabLit’s M. Lynx Qualey “gather to reflect on this landmark project and the important role of poetics in Middle Eastern culture.”
