14 Books by Arab Women for 2024’s Women in Translation Month

Another graphic novel by the talented Lamia Ziadé, translated by the talented Emma Ramadan. This book, winner of the Prix littéraire France-Liban, is an illustrated history that begins at the opening of the twentieth century and combines travelogue, memoir, and Ziadé’s evocative art.

Other books of Ziadé‘s we recommend include the heartbreaking My Port of Beirut (also translated by Emma Ramadan, 2023); her childhood memoir Bye Bye Babylon. Beirut 1975-1979 (translated by Olivia Snaije, 2012); and her gorgeous Ô nuit, ô mes yeux (not yet translated), which follows the stories of some of the greatest musical artists of the twentieth century.

The Djinn’s Apple, by Djamila Morani, translated by Sawad Hussain (February 2024)

In this work of historical crime fiction set in Abbasid Baghdad, young Nardeen must flee her home when a mob of men come to murder her family and search her home for something — something that’s clearly precious. In this YA novel that’s “girl detective meets 1,001 Nights,” Nardeen must discover who murdered her family.

As the publisher notes, the book is “full of mystery and mayhem,” and  “The Djinn’s Apple is perfect for fans of Arabian Nights, City of Brass, and The Wrath and the Dawn.”

Where the Wind Calls Home, by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (February 2024)

Samar Yazbek grows in strength with each novel, especially in her ability to inhabit the complex sensory worlds of different Syrian characters during moments of intense crisis. We particularly recommend this alongside Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, also tr. Price.

And from the publisher:

Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole—is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there … While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety.

Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.

Lost In Mecca, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Nada Faris (March 2024)

Lost in Mecca opens as a seven-year-old Kuwaiti boy is separated from his parents during the Hajj pilgrimage. In this story — simultaneously racing forward and mired in quicksand — we follow the desperate search for this child and the simultaneous breakdown of his parents. As the days pass, and we see the search through different points of view, we realize that he is not the only missing child, and the novel confronts which children in the Gulf are considered valuable and which are considered disposable.

You can read an interview with Nada Faris about the novel and her translation process. Also, a piece about book censorship in Kuwait, as this novel was a censors’ target.

Before the Queen Falls Asleep, by Huzama Habayeb, tr. Kay Heikennen (March 2024)

A story of a displaced Palestinian family by the author of the acclaimed Velvet.

From the publisher:

Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy’s clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father.

Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Malika prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up.

You can also read a conversation with translation Kay Heikennen about the novel on ArabLit.

The Book Censor’s Library, by Bothayna Al-Essa, tr. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (April 2024)

And then, speaking of censors…

This year, we saw two translations of work by Al-Essa, who is an award-winning writer, a publisher, and a literary activist at the forefront of the anti-censorship movement in Kuwait. Here, Al-Essa crafts a satire of banned books, secret archives, and authoritarian governance. As the publisher writes:

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

A Long Walk from Gaza, by Asmaa Alatawna, translated by Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah (May 2024)

As the publisher writes:

In the tradition of Palestinian women writers, Asmaa Alatawna a has gifted us a novel that is both personal and political, that exposes both the occupation and the patriarchy. A Long Walk from Gaza is a coming-of-age story that follows its teenage protagonist through her battles with a strict and abusive father, the exhilaration of her first crush, confrontations with occupation soldiers, and the heartbreak of leaving her home Gaza for a new life in Europe. Beginning in Europe and working backward to her own birth and early childhood, Alatawna’s creative narration mirrors the traumas of her life and her people.

You can read an excerpt from the novel on ArabLit.

Silken Gazelles, by Jokha al-Harthi, translated by Marilyn Booth

This novel returns us to the fragmented worlds of Booker International-winning Jokha al-Harthi, in Booker International-winning translation by Marilyn Booth. We also, naturally, recommend both previous novels by al-Harthi’s in Booth’s translation: Celestial Bodies and Bitter Orange Tree.

This novel is also a family story focused on women’s histories, this time of two women raised as sisters, but who are forced to separate by tragedy. Still, even though Ghazalaa is separated from her childhood friend and grows up elsewhere, this friendship has shaped her ideas of love and shadows the relationships to come.

A conversation with al-Harthi is forthcoming on ArabLit.

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, by Dunya Mikhail, translated by the author (September 2024)

This bilingual book of poetry — by the author of the collections The Iraqi Nights (tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid) and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and The War Works Hard (tr. Elizabeth Winslow) — tells a story in ten tablets, each one bringing together a self-described “primitive” drawing with the author’s own Arabic calligraphy and English translation.

She writes: “I practiced at least two layers of translation in Tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. Sometimes the poems seemed to be written in both languages simultaneously.”

An excerpt from this collection is forthcoming in ArabLit.

Thunderbird: Book Three, by Sonia Nimr, translated by M Lynx Qualey (September 2024)

In this thrilling conclusion to Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird trilogy — in which a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Noor must save the world, with a little help from a djinn/cat companion — we travel to the world beyond the wall, the world of djinn and other creatures, and meet strange beings that Noor must help before she can return to Jerusalem and seize the final feathers of the thunderbird, in a bid to stop the collapse of the world.

Naturally, we also recommend books 1 & 2, which were shortlisted for the 2023 Banipal Translation Prize and which, of course, set up the action in book 3.

Granada: The Complete Trilogy, by Radwa Ashour, translated by Kay Heikkinen (November 2024)

This complete translation (previously, only the first book was available in William Granara’s translation) is finally set to appear on the 10th anniversary of Dr. Radwa Ashour’s death.

The trilogy — listed as one of the 100 best books of the twentieth century by the Arab Publishers Union — opens at a critical moment, in the late fifteenth century, on the Iberian peninsula. It is when the return of Christopher Columbus heralds a genocide on a new continent; the Inquisition tightens its grip on its Muslim citizens; and a fictional bookseller dies of grief. This multigenerational novel follows the descendants, both biological and adopted, of the bookseller, in a compelling story that has a great deal to say about how genocides happen.

Salt Journals: Tunisian Women on Political Imprisonment, edited by Haifa Zangana, Christalla Yakinthou, Virginie Ladisch, translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls, Nariman Youssef (December 2024)

The publisher writes: