Bahia Shehab on ‘A History of Arab Graphic Design’
“This is why many of the designers that we interviewed did not really document their design work because to them this was just work.”
Interviews
Mirrors Across Cultures: Maha Hassan in Conversation with Addie Leak
“I have trouble dealing with direct realist texts. Even in my novel, Good Morning, War!, which is the closest thing I’ve written to fact or memoir, my mother, who passed away, narrates the day-to-day of the war in Aleppo from the grave.”
On Cairo’s New Agency for Literature and the Arts
“When I came back to Egypt and started looking for a publisher for my first novel, I faced a lack of a clear process to submit my manuscript to one of the publishing houses or even a clear requirement, or a minimum standard to get my work published.”
James Montgomery on Translation, ‘The Vehicle I’ve Been Looking For All Along’
There was a point at which I thought: ‘translation is the vehicle I have been looking for all along for me to try and bring the poetry to life without suffocating or crushing it under this enormously academic super structure.’ Of course, you need all the academic stuff to get inside the poem.
Multiple Sclerosis and its Literary Representation: A Talk with Reema Humood
“As a disabled female academic living with (and researching) MS, I sat down with the author to discuss her novel’s gendered elements of disability. In particular, I wanted to know more about her position as abled-bodied author and her choice of MS as the protagonist’s disease.”
Translation as Lifeline: Paula Haydar on Translating Jabbour Douaihy
“Translation was my lifeline during Covid. For that I am deeply and eternally grateful to have had such a meaningful outlet and source of inspiration in my life. Nothing gives a person more nourishment for the soul than a good novel, and no one gets more from a literary work than a translator.”
On Translating the Linguistic Diversity of ‘Hot Maroc’
” Like Rahhal, I specialized in Arabic literature in university, so many of the literary references, jokes, and asides were familiar to me, but many more were not and I found myself diving deeply into biographical dictionaries and classical Arabic poetry collections just to keep up.”
‘The Other Grape’: A New Magazine & Wine Series Featuring Maghrebi and Mashreqi Productions
“Lebanon is beginning to see a boom in agile, small wineries that are promoting a specifically Lebanese identity to their wines, of which indigenous grapes are an important aspect. This is to me a profoundly anti-hegemonic stance based on the recognition that there is no need to emulate some French idea of excellence.”
Sonallah Ibrahim’s Moscow: A Conversation with Margaret Litvin
“So the main challenge was to convey that numbness and ill-mannered quality on the level of style, while still producing a book clear enough to be readable. That was a negotiation with the publisher, as you can imagine.”