Coming Oct 2026: An IPAF Winner, a Classic & More

“Must be one of Uncle Milad’s” is a well-known insult among Libyans, typically said of a ‘Milad’, a man who struggles to rein in the women who should be obedient to him. Failing to do so he sullies not only his reputation, but that of ‘his’ women.”

Milad has always found comfort in the rituals of the kitchen—the steady rhythm of preparing meals, the warmth of fresh bread, the quiet satisfaction of caring for those he loves. But in a society where a man’s worth is measured by entirely different standards, he fails to live up to his father’s expectations of a man.

It’s only after marrying his childhood sweetheart Zainab that he can embrace being himself, performing domestic household duties while she becomes the family breadwinner. But while the unconventional arrangement suits the couple, Milad earns his village’s scorn and a series of tragic events are set into motion.

Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Mohammed Alnaas’s explosive debut is an unflinching but deeply compassionate novel about love, belonging, and the cost of defying what’s expected of you.

Also read:

A Playlist for Mohammed Alnaas’s ‘Bread for Uncle Milad’s Table’

On Translating a Novel of ‘Profound Gentleness in a Violent Milieu’

On an Award-Winning Novel & the Unstable Literary Scene in Libya

Kneading Words: Mohammed Alnaas on Bread, Writing, and the Stuff of Language

Musings of a Young Woman, translated by Dana Al Shahbari, Boutheina Khaldi, Marilyn Booth, Chloe Bordewich, Meriem Essaoudy, Fatima El-Kalay, Layla AlAmmar, Ranya Abdelrahman, Alaa Alqaisi, and Imane Amraoui. Series Editor Ibtihal Rida Mahmood (ArabLit Books, October 12 2026)

From the publisher:

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.

As scholar Marilyn Booth argues, Ziadeh’s work participates in a form of autobiographical writing that is “surreptitious, muted, or sketchy,” embedded within genres that do not announce themselves as self-narration. What emerges is not a single, stable “I,” but a shifting one: sometimes plural “we young women,” sometimes intimate “you, at the window,” sometimes displaced into the stories of others.

This new translation of Sawanih Fatat, brought forth by a collective of women translators and editors, echoes the text’s own opening gesture: a “we” that writes, reads, and reclaims together. There is something fitting, almost poetic, about a team of skilled, educated women carrying forward a text that wrestles, again and again, with what it means for women to write, to be read, to be seen. It is also, inevitably, an act of interpretation, one that must grapple with the nuances of Ziadeh’s prose; its shifts in tone moving between candor and sarcasm.

Ziadeh once expressed the hope that someone might do her justice after her death; we took it as an invitation and gladly accepted it.

The collective includes: Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Dana Al Shahbari, M Lynx Qualey, Mennan Salih, Boutheina Khaldi, Marilyn Booth, Chloe Bordewich, Meriem Essaoudy, Fatima El-Kalay, Layla AlAmmar, Ranya Abdelrahman, Alaa Alqaisi, Imane Amraoui, Allison Armijo, Anam Zafar, Emma Hardy, and Leonie Böttiger.

Find more at arablit.org/mayziadeh/.