Women Translation Month: 11 New & Notable Books by Women
August is Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), a month to focus on women’s writing in translation.
As in past years, this month, ArabLit will highlight books, stories, and poetry by women in and for translation. This year, we’ll have a special emphasis on overlooked classics by women writers, including new translations (and fresh examinations) of work by luminaries like May Ziadeh, Alis al-Bustani, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Zoulikha Saoudi.
We’ll also — in our August Newsletter for Publishing Professionals — have discussions with women writers, asking them to recommend books by other women, as well as women-run publishing houses and women-run book spaces.
Readers can also expect conversations, reflections, and essays by and about women writers.
FICTION
Songs for Darkness, by Iman Humaydan Yunis, tr. Michelle Hartman (Interlink, March 3, 2026)
From the publisher:
This powerful novel traces the intertwined lives of four generations of Lebanese women, using their personal losses and resilience to reflect the collective pain of a nation scarred by war, patriarchy, and displacement. Through Asmahan’s effort to recover and honor these silenced histories, Iman Humaydan crafts a moving testament to memory, survival, and the hope of breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma.
On ArabLit:
From Iman Humaydan’s ‘Songs for Darkness’
In Conversation: Songs as Memory, as Solidarity, as Resistance
On Post-War Writing, Women’s Stories, and Translation: A Talk with Iman Humaydan
Mariam, It’s Arwa, by Areej Gamal, tr. Addie Leak (AUC Press, Mar 24, 2026)
From the publisher:
It is during the 2011 Egyptian revolution that Arwa and Mariam meet in a subway station near Cairo University. Arwa has returned from Germany to join the protests, and their chance encounter is to change the course of Mariam’s sheltered existence. They tell each other the stories of their mothers and grandmothers, the histories that have brought them to this point. Mariam was born in Saudi Arabia, and first set foot in Egypt after both her parents were killed in a car accident. Arwa’s mother also died a tragic, early death, and she, traveling in the opposite direction as Mariam, left Egypt to escape. This is a mesmerizing and otherworldly debut novel about finding salvation and finding oneself, despite the anguish and traumas of the past. It pivots on the present moment of Arwa and Mariam’s unexpected union, and at its heart is a recognition of the women who came before them.
On ArabLit:
From Areej Gamal’s ‘Mariam, It’s Arwa’
Dreams of Ayn Ara, by Sara Abu Ghazal, tr. Katharine Halls (Feminist Press, August 18 2026)
From the publisher:
In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.
Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic — culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.
Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.
Also read:
An interview with Sara Abu Ghazal,” Middle East Report 309 (Winter 2023)
Suleima’s Ring, by Rima Bali, translated by Timothy Gregory (Interlink, July 28 2026)
From the publisher:
Unfolding across Aleppo and Toledo, it tells the interwoven stories of half Spanish, half Jewish photographer Lucas and Syrian protagonist Salma. Switching between multiple narrators, it explores the relationships between Salma and Shams al-Din—an Italian musician living in Aleppo with whom she is infatuated—along with Lucas, Lucas’ girlfriend Lola, and his son. Bali skillfully navigates the complexities of relationships, traditions, and the ever-elusive concept of truth. The novel, born in the historic city of Toledo, Spain, carries the fragrance of Aleppo, inviting readers to wander through its ancient alleys and rest on the banks of the Tagus River.
The titular ring, at times held by various characters, alludes to the legendary ring of Solomon with its fabled magical powers. Although Salma, Lucas, and Shams al-Din are distinct personalities from contrasting backgrounds, they all share one thing: their love for Aleppo, the enthralling and afflicted city buried under the rubble of dreams and lost opportunities. Suleima’s Ring navigates Salma’s struggle between love and duty, past affluence, and a present marked by loss and conflict. The novel poses questions about Salma’s heart’s compass and her ultimate decision. Will she succumb to the sands of the past, or will she embrace the West’s taut bowstring? Will Suleima’s magic ring be enough to free the lost souls of Aleppo? Or will it take another Solomon to come to life and reassert his authority over the warring creatures who are left, if he can only find his lost ring?
Suleima’s Ring draws the reader into an atmosphere permeated by Sufism, perfume, dreams, and passionate love, against the backdrop of the Syrian war.
The Garden We Carry, by Bushra Khalfan, tr. Luke Leafgren (Dar Arab, 2026)
From the publisher:
When Rashid and his sister Rayya leave their mountain village, they carry little with them—only what necessity allows. What they leave behind does not loosen its hold.
In Muscat, the world rearranges itself. Land gives way to labour, and kinship to survival. What once sustained them now belongs to others.
The Garden We Carry is a novel of displacement without spectacle. Refusing drama in favour of accumulation, it traces the slow transformation of a life once rooted in land into one governed by work, hierarchy, and power.
With remarkable restraint, Bushra Khalfan renders a world in which dignity is tested not through crisis, but through endurance—and where freedom is not lost all at once, but gradually, almost imperceptibly.
This is a novel about what remains when everything else has been taken—and what must be carried forward.
On ArabLit:
POETRY
Enter World, by Dalia Taha, tr. Sara Elkamel (Graywolf Press, 2026)
From the publisher:
Writing from Ramallah, Dalia Taha captures her proximity to the Gaza genocide—the losses unspeakable and the destruction near total. In Enter World, poetry emerges as an answer to the violences of war, as a means to encounter and foster resilience. Taha’s lines bear witness to the atrocities in Palestine, but also reflect lyrically on beauty, justice, and humanity.
In Sara Elkamel’s spare and emotionally direct translation, each poem’s title begins with “enter,” an invitation to fill an empty stage, for a landscape to form. The poet’s world materializes: olive trees, hills, inscribed walls in prison cells. These images accrue into an intimate and mythic declaration of resistance through art, of beauty found amid terror. A world is captured, made permanent on the page, even as it is obliterated.
On ArabLit:
NONFICTION
Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (Fitzcarraldo Editions, May 21 2026)
From the publisher:
In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. From these encounters comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a bombing, the book’s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans. That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and mechanisms of cruelty that defy comprehension. In gathering these testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and the survivors’ determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.
On ArabLit:
On Redefining Collective Memory, In Conversation: Between Samar Yazbek and Olivia Snaije
Translating Trauma, the Trauma of Translating
CLASSICS
Sa’iba, by Alis al-Bustani, tr. Marilyn Booth (Oxford World’s Classics, June 2026)
From the publisher:
Alis al-Bustani’s Sa’iba (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people’s choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In Sa’iba, the focus is on what happens after the wedding, as the eponymous heroine has to fend off a jealous cousin who believes he has a right to her. Drawing on motifs of Victorian Gothic writing, brought into an Arab-Turkish fictional context, the novel powerfully shows the continuing hold of old ideas about women’s sexual susceptibility and moral ‘weakness’, as such ideas were slowly giving way among educated Arab and other Ottoman middle classes to new ideals of companionship in marriage.
Musings of a A Young Woman, by May Ziadeh, translated by the ArabLit collective (ArabLit Books, October 2026)
MUSINGS of a YOUNG WOMAN, by May Ziadeh, translated and edited by a collective of women and published by Arablit Books, will be available October 2026. You can pre-order now to support the project.
The English translation of Sawanih Fatat (Musings of a Young Woman) by May Ziadeh arrives as the second title in ArabLit’s ERASED, NOT FORGOTTEN series, following Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman). If Azzam emerged as a literary voice in the wake of the 1948 Nakba, then Ziadeh’s prose reaches further back into the early tremors of the Arab Nahda, to ask a question that still feels dangerously current: what does it mean for a woman to write herself into existence?
Neither memoir nor manifesto, Sawanih is a genre-defying book that combines essays, reflections, poems, even a microplay. It speaks in a voice that is at once singular and collective: “We young women who write,” insisting on women’s right to think and question, to be read as more than an auxiliary to the human species.
On ArabLit:
FOR YOUNG READERS
Asad’s Secret, by Najlaa Attaallah, tr. Sawad Hussain (Levine Querido, June 2, 2026)
From the publisher:
Asad lives in Gaza, in a tiny house, on a narrow street pocked by half-destroyed buildings, in a camp that looks shabby to him and feels claustrophobic. He walks virtually the same route every day to his summer job at a printing press, passing the prison that holds his father, for reasons that have not been fully explained to him. As the oldest son, he feels the weight of responsibility for his seven brothers, his sisters, and his Ummi, who wants him to study hard and excel in school, as all mothers do. Moody and reserved Asad has few friends, and fewer distractions. Thank goodness for Um Fawzi, a feisty, cigarette-smoking old woman, who’s the only one who seems willing to tell it like it is, sharply enough, and with a biting sense of humor that snaps him out of his fog sometimes. There’s also Houriya, a lovely and smart girl, who brings him books to read and sometimes prompts him to think about a future that he can’t truly imagine. There seems to be no escaping. But Asad has a secret, too, a mysterious black bag that holds something important that he keeps hidden from everyone. This rare novel by and about Palestinians showcases this boy whose life is never easy, even as it’s filled with the longing, the bruised hopes, and the frustrations of any seventeen-year-old.
On ArabLit:
The Necklace of Seven Souls, by Hooda Shawa, tr. Nour Jaljuli and Sawad Hussain (Yonder, September 2026)
From the publisher:
Farida and Mazen, two Arab teenagers of Palestinian heritage, meet during a chance encounter at the Louvre in France. Farida is a talented painter who recreates European masterpieces under the patronizing gaze of an art dealer, while Mazen is visiting the art museum to solve the mystery of a family heirloom. As the two come to know each other, they discover a shared history between their grandmothers (sittis). Farida’s sitti fled her home during the Nakba in 1948, and put down roots in Syria–now also beset by war. The Nakba made Mazen’s sitti a refugee too, but she carried her diary and letters in a velvet-lined box when her family was forced into exile. Velvet Box Letters moves from Paris to Haifa, from Aleppo to Tangier, conjuring the vibrant cities of the Mediterranean with all the warmth of memory. In this enchanting English debut, Hooda Shawa explores how young Palestinians in the diaspora can redefine their stories while reclaiming the legacy of their forebears.
On ArabLit:
A conversation with author Hooda Shawa is forthcoming later this month.