‘He Dies for As Long As Possible’

For June 2026, our Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals (this month, curated by Masoud Masoud) will focus on Libya’s publishing scene: publishers, prizes, festivals, and how authors make things work in an unstable living, working, reading, and publishing environment. Thus, this month, we will be particularly featuring excerpts from Libyan works.

This short piece appeared, in a slightly different form, in the SONG issue of ArabLit Quarterly in the Spring of 2021.

An Open Window

By Najwa Bin Shatwan

Translated by M Lynx Qualey

An open window / the sound of cars speeding by / a documentary about amphibians on TV, and the sound of a woman in the kitchen / The smell of meat and vegetable stew / Greek folk music in the kitchen / the doorbell’s ring / boys having fun in the elevator / A man sits on the bed / cigarette smoke swims in his room / a full ashtray / clothes piled up on the chair / old newspapers on the table / a tennis racket hung on the wall / musical notes on the shelves / a chin unshaven for days / He goes to the kitchen / and rubs his back, standing at the door / I’m hungry / The woman murmurs a few words: “Music . . . Music is food . . . for the soul.”

He turns back to the room / lies on the bed / closes his eyes / The open window moves toward him / He jumps out / The window shakes him off and returns to its place / The room clings to the smell of his cigarettes / His shoes don’t catch him, they stay by the bed / The musical notes fall to the floor / The doorbell rings for one long beat / It’s an emergency / The woman opens the door / The song ends, and another begins / The neighbors give her the news of her husband’s suicide.

The bell sounds successive rings / He opens his eyes /The door opens / The neighbors say:

We tried to save him, but we couldn’t catch him / He escaped from us and died instantly.

He closes his eyes and dies for as long as possible.

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist, born in Ajdabiya, Libya, in 1970. She was the first Libyan author to be shortlisted, in 2017, for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for her novel The Slave Yards (2016). She has written four other novels: The Horses’ Hair (2007), Orange Content (2008), Concerto Qurina Eduardo (2022), which was also shortlisted for the IPAF, and Tree of Soap (2026). She was chosen as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 40 by the Beirut39 project (2009-2010) organized by the Hay Festival, and her story ‘The Pool and the Piano’ was included in the Beirut39 anthology. In 2018, Binshatwan won a Banipal fellowship for creative writing. In 2019, her short story collection Serendipity (2019) was longlisted for the Almultaqa Short Story Prize, and her collection Catalogue of a Private Life (2018) won the English Pen Translates Award. In 2023, she was awarded the John Fante Career Prize for her literary works. You can read more about why her work should be available more widely in translation at the LEILA website.