The Flash Fiction Questionnaire: Winning Author Karima Ahdad

For our forthcoming bilingual publication — which will feature the fifteen short stories shortlisted for the 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction Prize, co-produced by ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel — we made up our own sort of Proust questionnaire for the authors. In it, we’ve asked each of them the same 15 questions you’ll find below.

Excerpts from their answers will appear in the print collection, and they will also run in fuller versions online, here at ArabLit.

Moroccan writer Karima Ahdad was the first-place winner of the 2024 prize with her short story “A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot” (شوكةٌ رفيعة تحفر عميقاً في قدمي).

You can find more from Karima Ahdad at our YouTube channel (where she talks about her debut novel, Cactus Girls); at The Markaz Review (where you can find an excerpt of that novel in Katherine Van de Vate’s translation); here on ArabLit (where we have a conversation with Karima ); and on the BULAQ podcast (where she’s a featured guest.)

 

 

 

Tell us about a short-story author whose work you particularly admire.

Karima Ahdad: Anton Chekhov. I love how he combines depth and simplicity in his works, and I am riveted by his sarcastic style and his ability to condense.

If you were to start a literary prize, what would it be for, how would it be judged, and what would people win?

Karima Ahdad: A literary award for the novel, because I enjoy them and prefer the novel over other genres (both writing and reading them). This is my personal preference. The foundations on which the members of the jury should rely are: literary value, of course; creativity in dealing with the subject matter; avoidance of stereotypes and repetition; creating complex characters with multiple dimensions…

The contestants will be awarded a sum of money. I think that writers need money more than anything else, in order to be able to devote themselves to writing and focus on gifting more literature to the world.

 Tell us about an opening sentence you find particularly compelling, in any work of fiction.

Karima Ahdad: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.” This is the sentence with which Orhan Pamuk begins his novel My Name is Red. Death is the end, the nothingness, the thing after which you can do nothing else. And yet, you can also start from it, draw the reader in, and build an entire world from it. This is the magic of literature.

*English translation by Erdağ Göknar.

What author, living or dead,  would you like to have on WhatsApp?  

Karima Ahdad: Jane Austen

What advice on writing—that you were told, or perhaps read somewhere—do you find most useless, stupid, or ridiculous?

Karima Ahdad: That “I have to stop writing about women in order to be a real writer.” I was still at the beginning of my literary career, and these words really angered me, but I later understood that they simply show a limited horizon, and that ignorance can affect writers, too. Now I don’t get angry at such things. Quite the opposite, I laugh to myself and go on my way.

What advice on writing—that you were told or perhaps read somewhere—have you found most useful and nourishing?

Karima Ahdad: That a writer (especially a novelist) must be disciplined and write always, every day. I think I succeeded in writing my three novels—despite the pressures of work, lack of time and the temptations of life—thanks to only two things: passion and discipline.

When did you start writing? Do you remember anything about the first piece you ever wrote, or the place that you wrote it?

Karima Ahdad: I was about ten years old, and I was sitting on the roof of our house in the Tiganimine area of Al Hoceima. It was only a few kilometers from the city center, but it was a very marginalized area, like a distant village. Its houses remained without drinking water and its streets without names or addresses for a long time after. This is where I grew up and studied in a school without toilets, a yard, or guards.

Life was dull, and I didn’t leave the house except to go to school or the grocery store. I remember that day when I was ten well; I was sitting under the scorching summer sun, turning the pages of an old school notebook, feeling bored. Suddenly, the idea of writing a story came to my mind. At the time, I knew nothing about the way in which people wrote stories—I didn’t know any writers, and I didn’t know what the components of a story might be, what inspiration was, or character… Still, I imagined the story of a girl for whom I chose the name Nora, and I began to describe her outward appearance and present her dreams, problems, ambitions, and the details of her life…

It was so much fun, even more fun than playing with the blonde dolls I always loved… Of course, at that time, I’d heard many fairy tales from my grandmothers, my mother, and the women of the family, and I loved listening to the women around me telling stories that had actually happened… It was as if what I wrote on that distant day, twenty years ago, was a recycling of the stories I had heard, which I mixed with things I had witnessed in reality. I think that this moment is what formed the essence of my writing style.

Tell us about one of the main places where you write. Is it at a desk, on a couch, in bed? At a coffeeshop? Secretly, while at work?

Karima Ahdad: I like to write sitting on the sofa in my living room, usually before going to work, and sometimes after coming back from it.

What is one poem you have memorized that you sometimes recite to yourself?

Karima Ahdad: It’s verses from two different poems. The first is by Al-Mutanabbi, in which he says:

وإذا كانت النفوس كباراً

تعِبَت في مرادها الأجسامُ

The second is by Nazik Al-Malaika, in which she says:

ليتني لم أزل كما كنتُ طفلاً ليس فيه إلّا السنا والنقاء

كلّ يومٍ أبني حياتي أحلاماً وأنسى إذا أتاني المساء

If this short story of yours was adapted into a film, who would you like to act in it? Do you have any advice for the director, videographer, or costume designer?

Karima Ahdad: The Egyptian actress Menna Shalabi.

The film should be simple and very realistic. It should not be commercial, but it should have high creative and artistic standards. Something similar to the style of Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi.

 If you were asked to design a bookshop near your home, what would you make sure it had? Comfortable chairs? A hidden nook for reading? Coffee and tea? Something else?

Karima Ahdad: It should have comfortable sofas and a beautiful back garden that delights the soul.

If you were going to write using a pen name or pseudonym, what would it be?

Karima Ahdad: I have never considered writing under a pseudonym. I like to face the world under my real name. But I might try publishing a text under a male, non-Arab name, as I’m very curious to know how my writings would be received and read if they were written not by a woman from Morocco, but by a man from Britain called Henry Williams, for example.

Where do you find new stories that you enjoy reading? Do you find them in magazines, online, from particular publishers? How do you discover new writing?

Karima Ahdad: I go to the library and pick books at random, just like I always did as a teenager, thirsty for discovery and knowledge.

Did you have a favorite book, story, or poem as a child or teen? What has its impact on you been?

Karima Ahdad: There were many books, including Now Here Or The Eastern Mediterranean Again by Abdel Rahman Munif, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, The Beginning and the End by Naguib Mahfouz, Two Women in One by Nawal El Saadawi, The Prophet by Gibran Khalil Gibran… In fact, I used to devour every book I found in front of me when I was a teenager, and each of these books gave language to the writer’s voice that was stirring inside me.

If you could change one thing about how publishing works, what would it be?

Karima Ahdad: I would eliminate the commercial considerations that allow mediocrity to spread and that suffocate emerging creative writers, and I would judge texts by purely creative and artistic criteria.

This project is funded by the British Council’s Beyond Literature Borders programme corun by Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions.

Karima Ahdad is a Moroccan author based in Istanbul. She has been working in journalism and digital-content production since 2014, and she has published three novels: Cactus Girls, published by Dar Al-Fink in 2018; A Turkish Dream, published by the Arab Cultural Center in 2021; and The Other Woman, published by Al-Mutawassit Publications in 2024. She won the Moroccan Writers Union Award for Young Writers in the Short Story category, and her novel Cactus Girls won a Mohamed Zafzaf Award in 2020. She is the first-place winner of ArabLit & Komet Kashakeel’s 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction competition.