This novel – Naqqash’s first – was published in Arabic in 1986, and draws on the author’s own life experiences. His family fled Iraq in 1951 when he was just 13. Unlike most other writers who left Baghdad’s once-thriving Jewish community for Israel, Naqqash continued to write in Arabic until his death in 2004.
BIRDS
have no hands.
They don’t expect a crutch
in old age
First prize went to Nawal Nasrallah for her informative and elegant translation of the fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook “Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table,” author unknown.
You will also ‘feel’ the beauty of Aleppo before the war, and the sorrow of what happened to it during the conflict.
Yesterday, PEN America announced the longlists for its 2019 literary awards.
“For narrative is a feminine land, and it is a forest . . . hidden behind the likely and the possible.”
Unlike most travel literature, al-Khamis’s “Voyage of the Cranes over the Agate Cities”: “focuses on the role of women in this age: as scholar, scientist, and imam of a mosque.”
“It’s all so damn tantalizing, you know?”
This year’s judges are Tahia Abdel Nasser, Shereen Abouelnaga, Mona Tolba, Humphrey Davies, and Rasheed El-Enany.
