Playwright Lucien Bourjeily (@lucienbourjeily), nominated to win a 2014 Index Freedom of Expression Award for his censored play “Is It Permitted or Not,” has just stated that, following the banning of his play, which “criticizes the General Security censorship bureau, today the General Security banned me in 2014 from traveling and perform another play in London next month…”
This week, the 2014 Palestine Festival of Literature announced its full lineup and schedule. Events are set to be held in six cities with the inclusion of such luminaries of world literature as Teju Cole, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, and Najwan Darwish.
This month, Omar Hazek will see his second novel published. Under other circumstances, Hazek’s short novel, set in the afterlife, would likely go unnoticed outside Egypt’s narrow literary circles. Yet this novel has captured attention – not because of its unusual setting, but because it was written inside Alexandria’s Borg al-Arab and al-Hadara prisons.
“For the poetic parts I couldn’t forget Eliot of course, who sometimes hovers there. I even cheated and slipped some Eliot in, with Amjad’s permission.”
“Authors aren’t all evil, of course, and one of their problems might also lie in the fact that there are no editors, no one to read and critically delete redundant parts, advise and restructure what needs to be reset.”
Dihia Louiz is one of three emerging authors who appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair’s Majlis Al Mutannabi, courtesy of the Daad initiative. Before that, she answered a few questions about switching between languages and writing about the events in Algeria in the spring of 2001.
The launch of Kotobi had a ripple effect, as Aboulfotouh sees it, and as a result there are a growing number of initiatives coming out of Egypt.
While fiction and poetry should never be read as history — or as a substitute for such — the Catastrophe has been the scene for some of Arabic’s most brilliant creative works.
After two weeks detained in Abu Dhabi following this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, German author Jörg Albrecht has been granted passage home. According to his publisher, he arrived in Berlin this morning.
