This is a follow-up to 5 Thoughts from Raymond Stock on Translating the Master. Stock, who has been working on a biography of Naguib Mahfouz, expressed an interest in publishing today […]
UPDATE: Sotheby’s has withdrawn the Mahfouz materials from tomorrow’s auction. They issued this statement: “While it is clear that Sotheby’s consignor had purchased the Mahfouz manuscripts from a member of Naguib […]
This Sunday morning, the organizers of the biannual Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais Award announced their 2010-2011 winners. The winners included Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (fiction) and Lebanese poet Mohammad […]
My write-up of the event is in Al Masry Al Youm. To sum up: The big surprise was that the Naguib Mahfouz Medal award went to “the revolutionary creativity of the Egyptian […]
I try not to participate in the spectacle of the U.S. presidential debates, but comments by Republican candidate Newt Gingrich aligned rather oddly with the memoir I’m reading: Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, trans. Humphrey Davies.
Two awards this week for authors who hail from the Levant: On Wednesday, Lebanese poet Venus Khoury-Ghata won the prestigious 2011 Goncourt Prize for poetry and on Thursday, the incisive Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat was […]
Sotheby’s in London is scheduled to auction off what it’s calling “a major cache of manuscripts by Naguib Mahfouz.” The archive, being estimated at £50,000 – £70,000, is set to […]
Recently, a U.S.-based professor and I were discussing the possibility of teaching Ali Bader’s The Tobacco Keeper (in translation) to undergraduates. Or rather, I suggested the novel, and she – after […]
By Margaret Litvin “Didn’t I tell you?” the colonel’s daughter Fayza al-Tuhami tells the semi-conscious protagonist of Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s Qamar ʻAla Samarqand (Moon Over Samarqand). “Those soldiers, they’re always […]
