Lit & Found: ‘How Salma Khadra Jayyusi Brought Arabic Literature to the Anglophone World’

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dima Ayoub remembers the late Salma Khadra Jayyusi, who died this past April at the age of 100.

In it, Ayoub notes:

Deeply committed to the notion of disseminating Arabic literature in English—in order to render Arabs legible to the English-speaking world—Jayyusi often found herself frustrated by the lack of formal recognition for these efforts in the Arabic-speaking world. Jayyusi, who had a leading role in the nomination of Naguib Mahfouz for the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, was dumbfounded to discover that the Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy housed a grand total of four books by Arab authors. Without her advocacy and recommendation to the Nobel committee, the course of Arabic literature in translation would look very different today.

Read the whole essay at the LARB.