Nouri al-Jarrah, Rosa Yassin Hassan and ‘Syria in the Heart’

On January 17, Banipal magazine and Waterstones bookshop will host an evening with Syrian authors Nouri Al-Jarrah and Rosa Yassin Hassan, both featured in Banipal 57: Syria in the Heart:

The event is set for 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Piccadilly Waterstones.

According to organizers:

From the burning heart of Syria, writers call time on the relentless forced fleeing, deaths and destruction. Nouri al-Jarrah reads and discusses his dramatic poem “A Boat to Lesbos,” Rosa Yassin Hassan’s novel People Under a Spell spans the spectrum of opinion and factions.

In Yassin Hassan’s novel, characters struggle to understand the “rising waves of extremism, hatred and violence” and how it was that Syrian society “collapsed almost completely in such a short period.”

Al-Jarrah’s poem, trans. Camilo Gomez-Rivas, opens:

I saw lightning in the east

in a wink

then west

I saw the sun dripping

in its blood

and the sea agitated

and the past robbed of its books

You can read more on the Banipal website.

Also featured in the wide-ranging issue 57 are an excerpt from Dima Wannous’s latest novel The Frightened, published last month; an excerpt from Khaled Khalifa’s latest novel, Death is Hard Work, expected on the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) longlist next week; an excerpt from Maha Hassan’s new novel Aleppo Metro, also expected on the 2017 IPAF longlist; “One Sky,” a short story by celebrated author Liana Badr; and more.