124 Novels in the Running for 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction
“Thirty of this year’s submissions — about a quarter — were books by women, which is roughly similar to past years.”
News
‘Best Arabic Novel Award’ at This Year’s Sharjah Book Fair Goes to Banned ‘The Taste of the Wolf’
The winning book, according to the prize guidelines, must be “new and unique in its field” and not have won a previous literary award.
That’ll Do It: Jail Journalists for Using Colloquial Arabic
This impossible-to-enforce proposed law even sets its sights on “street advertisements, commercial posters, names of shops, and information on products sold in Egypt.”
Will Crowdfunding Become an Important Tool for Supporting Translations? A Look at Darf’s Spina Kickstarter
“Crowdfunding is becoming a useful tool for independent authors and publishers to reach a diverse readership.”
AmazonCrossing Now Accepting Submissions in Arabic
“Indeed, the AmazonCrossing website, which was previously English-only, now allows users to submit book proposals in Arabic, in addition to Bengali, German, English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.”
Friday Finds: New Work in Translation by Hassan Blasim, Fadwa Soleiman
Blasim also has a forthcoming novel, God 99, that follows Hassan Owl, an Iraqi who arrives in Finland as a writer and a refugee.
5 Books: Neil Hewison’s Most Memorable Books from 31 Years at AUC Press
“I have not kept count of the books, both fiction and non-fiction, that I have edited since I joined the AUC Press in 1986, but each one has been different, each one has had its challenges and its rewards, and from each one I have learned many things.”
‘Book of Sleep’: Intensive Reflections from Haytham El-Wardany
“El-Wardany refuses those depictions of sleeping as a passive act. Also, interestingly, he observes the moment of getting to sleep and builds his ideas on it, away from the usual talk about the dreams.”
An Excerpt from ‘The Effacement,’ Shortlisted for the 2017 Prix de la Littérature Arabe
The novel, according to The Nation, was “a sensation of the 2016 Algiers International Book Fair,” and it also won the Prix de l’Association France-Algérie earlier this year.