The Peninsula Qatar reported on Thursday that the Katara Novel Prize — which seems to be Qatar’s answer to the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) and Sheikh Zayed Book Award — is moving forward. The prize committee announced Wednesday that they’d received 220 entries ahead of the October 31 deadline.
According to the Arab American Museum’s Matthew Stiffler, the 2014 Arab American Book Awards — given to books published in 2013 — have just been announced.
The US-based National Endowment for the Arts has announced the latest round of literary translation fellowships.
Bookseller reported yesterday that Canongate had acquired a 466-page memoir written by Mauritanian Guantanamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, which Slahi finished in 2006, but which had apparently been held as a “classified secret” for seven years.
“Digital Sanctuaries Pittsburgh” launched last week — Aug. 7-9 — on that city’s north side, in a garden-to-garden walk featuring the work of acclaimed musicians and writers, including Dunya Mikhail and Osama Alomar. The virtual performances continue to echo.
The state-run Al-Ahram newspaper reported on August 8 that Major General Ahmed Abdallah, current governor of the Red Sea district, ordered that three dozen “Muslim Brotherhood” books at the Hurghada Public Library be burnt.
Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden — both at the American University in Cairo — won last year’s University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for their collection Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems […]
Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, of Gaza, “We are unfair to her when we search for her poems.” We are certainly unfair when we scrabble anywhere for poems, searching for aesthetic pleasure in others’ suffering. But here, poetry seems to have welled up from the need to speak, to create, to defy silence.
In two of his novels, The Corpse Washer and Hail Mary, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon has touched on the growing sectarianization of Iraq. In an interview published on Ahram Online and Jadaliyya, he says “it may be too late to save Iraq’s Christians.”
