"The news of your death reached me / one sweltering afternoon / as I sat with friends on a peak of Albaicín."
‘Hay Festival Abu Dhabi’ Announces 2020 Program Full of Literary Stars
“We absolutely want to make this festival work and to build on it, so that in 10 or 15 years’ time, people will perhaps look upon it in the way that the Colombians do with our festival in Cartagena.”
Leri Price Wins 2019 Banipal Translation Award
Leri Price has won the 2019 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for her "sharp and unobtrusive" translation of Khaled Khalifa's "Death is Hard Work."
Said Khatibi on the Entanglements of Story in Bosnia and Algeria
"When the war began in Sarajevo I was a child. I was in southern Algeria then. We sang songs in school about the children of Sarajevo, and we saw pictures of what was happening there on TV."
IPAF Longlistee Samir Kacimi, on the Evolution of the Algerian Novel
"So, to make up for lost time, I took out the doors and I painted them on the balcony. To make sure they would dry, I left them there and went to sleep, until I was awakened by my four-year-old son who was in a panic and was screaming that all the doors had disappeared. It is the horror I saw in his eyes and in the eyes of my wife that the idea of writing about a city with no doors grew in my mind."
New in Translation: Excerpt from Samir Kacimi’s IPAF-longlisted ‘The Stairs of Trollar’
"Here, everyone I meet greets me. Good morning. Sir. Welcome. At your service. Everyone here is polite to the point of disgust."
Sunday Submissions: Translator-in-residence at University of Iowa
Past recipients include Deborah Smith, Jennifer Croft, and Katherine Silver. More about how to apply at the University of Iowa website.
Call for Submissions: ArabLit Quarterly Winter/Spring 2020, THE ROAD
We prefer pitches to completed works; pitches should be in by January 18.
Friday Finds: ‘River of Honey, Lake of Milk’
"Ever since I discovered the miracle of white glue, I was drawn to her damaged books, repairing and binding them to heal their wounds."
A List: Arabic Literature Forthcoming in Translation in 2020
From classics to contemporary murder mysteries, picture books to philosophical meditations, the Arabic literature we know about that is forthcoming in English translation in 2020.
A List: French Maghrebi Literature Forthcoming in Translation in 2020
2020 promises books from both Mahi and Aziz BineBine, as well as Kaouther Adimi, a classic by Driss Chraïbi, and one by Tahar Ben Jelloun.
ArabLit’s Top 10 Stories and Essays of 2019
The ten most-read stories and essays on ArabLit in 2019.
