“Before I loved poems, I loved language. As a child I thought many times about inventing a new language and teaching it to the children my age, so that all of us could slip out of the world’s language in a way of our own. It was a childish, almost primal tenderness for words, and I still feel it in me.”
This episode of the BULAQ podcast asks: What has changed in the last twenty years in Arabic literature, publishing and translation? What has not?
“Barakat is forthright, crude, and uncensored in his writings, and he was the same in his responses to my questions. He paints a prophetic picture, neither for himself nor for anyone else.”
Born in the mid-1980s, Ahmed Alhokail is among the most distinctive Saudi writers of his generation. In this exchange, he talks about placing the ordinary at the center of the story, classical Arabic narratives as a living model, Najdi oral storytelling and the uncanny, and the “global reader.”
“Music is one of the arts most connected to place, as it is a physical vibration in a space.”
The Book of Damascus, ed. Zaher Omareen, is a new anthology in their “Reading the City” series. Here, editor Zaher Omareen talks with Fifi Bat-hef about selecting ten stories to represent a city as complex and storied as Damascus.
In this conversation, Hooda Shawa offers inspiring insight into her experience writing such a personal and powerful novel as well as herself as an author.
Editors of the anthology Palestine is Everywhere — Skye Arundhati Thomas, Edwin Nasr, and Gloria Habsburg — recently launched a new “Palestine is Everywhere” platform to host a series of monthly commissions, “creating an ongoing space to support and amplify the work of artists, writers, and practitioners from Palestine and the wider region.”
“Some classical poets feel that the popularity of colloquial writers has nothing to do with the quality of their work, but rather because they have chosen the easier path.”
