On the Neglected Margins

In conversation with Elena Pare

Taissier Khalaf is a prolific Palestinian Syrian writer born in 1967. He has published over fifty books, including historical works, travel literature, and fiction. Here, he talks about The Andalusian Messiah, shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). The novel follows Gonzalez’s quest for identity after his Morisco mother’s execution in 1592 Andalusia. The author digs into “secrets and mysteries” of “neglected margins” and reflects on his literary journey.

Elena Pare: Congratulations on The Andalusian Messiah making it to the IPAF shortlist! Your novel Massacre of the Philosophers was longlisted in 2017. What impact did the prize have on your career at the time and what do you hope to get from it now?

Taissier Khalaf: It had a positive impact because it is the highest literary prize in the Arab world. Arab readers have great trust in it, so that this prize is the gateway to the Arab reader.

How did your literary journey begin? I think that your first published volume was a short story collection. Do you still write short stories, or do you aim to write longer more in-depth works?

TK: Yes, I started with short stories, though I did not want them published in a short story collection because, to me, they were experiments in writing. However, the great writer Abdelrahman Munif, who was a friend despite our age difference, read one of my short stories in the magazine Al-Hurriya in 1992 and asked me whether I had others, so I gave him my texts to read. He told me, “You must publish them in a story collection,” and he wrote an introduction to it for me. And it was published in 1993 at Dār al-Yanābī’ in Damascus under the title Other Cats. I no longer wrote short stories after this collection and rather began trying to write novels. My first novel Dafātir al-Kutuf al-Mā’ila (“Notebooks of Sliding Shoulders”) came out in 1996 and it was a relatively short novel.

What is your research and writing process, specifically in composing The Andalusian Messiah?

TK: I like to plunge into topics that have not been researched before because my passion is the discovery of new things. So my process is the study of marginalia, which are full of secrets. This is what happened for my novel The Andalusian Messiah, as all the characters that I researched are on the periphery of scholarship, and you can imagine how many secrets and mysteries there are in these neglected margins.

Can you tell us about your experience with Arab publishing houses? What do you recommend to emerging writers?

TK: My experience with the publishing houses I worked with is excellent. They were all reliable and committed to the contract terms. My advice to emerging authors is to hold on to their rights and not to pay for publication no matter the circumstances as this is a great mistake.

Your main interest seems to lie in history and you’ve written multiple history books as well as novels. What is the difference between these two types of writing? What prompts you to write a novel from historical events?

TK: I cannot decide which of these two interests comes first as they are equal to me, however in I’ve been tending more towards the historical novel in recent years… Some historical topics radiate more if they are turned into novels. The logic behind the historical novel is different from that of a history book. Characters entice me especially if they are mysterious, unexplored, multi-layered, and full of possibilities.

Looking at the IPAF nominees it seems that there is a great interest in historical novels. Do you think that there is a new or bigger interest in historical writing in our contemporary era, and if so, why? What can we learn from events that happened hundreds of years ago and from people that lived before us?

TK: The historical novel has its audience, which, in the Arabic literary scene, has existed since the nineteenth century. Human experience is very rich and we can learn a lot from it because the values and struggles in the past and the present are the same, though history bestows a certain charm to some issues.

You recently mentioned that your next work might revolve around a murder in nineteenth-century Damascus. Can you tell us more about this and any other upcoming projects?

TK: I’m still hesitating around my next work, but this subject compels me due to the mystery of its time and figures, and the mysteriousness of the incident itself. All of this tempts me to try and unlock it in novel form. I will write this work but I might write another novel first, about an archaeologist researching the meaning of human existence through relics.

Do you ever think of writing a novel set in our current era, or perhaps in the future?

TK: Yes, the novel I’m thinking of writing about the archaeologist starts in the contemporary moment but delves into distant human history.

  

Elena Pare is a French-Swiss-British graduate of the University of Cambridge in Arabic and Persian and an emerging translator of fiction from French, German and Arabic into English and French.

  

Also watch: The 2025 IPAF film about Taissier Khalaf and The Andalusian Messiah.