Two Plays by Ahmad Meree, in Arabic with English Surtitles, in Toronto
Two plays by Syrian playwright Ahmad Meree, in Arabic with English surtitles, made the “Now Toronto” list of 15 theatre shows to see in 2020.
Two plays by Syrian playwright Ahmad Meree, in Arabic with English surtitles, made the “Now Toronto” list of 15 theatre shows to see in 2020.
“The news of your death reached me / one sweltering afternoon / as I sat with friends on a peak of Albaicín.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Here, everyone I meet greets me. Good morning. Sir. Welcome. At your service. Everyone here is polite to the point of disgust.”
Past recipients include Deborah Smith, Jennifer Croft, and Katherine Silver. More about how to apply at the University of Iowa website.
We prefer pitches to completed works; pitches should be in by January 18.