For the first time, England’s International Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) has gone to a book translated from the Arabic: Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ, translated by Jonathan Wright.
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.
“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.
Keep Your Eye on the Wall, ed. Olivia Snaije and Mitch Albert, is less a coffee-table collection, and more — because of its accordion-style binding — a book to transect the floor of your living space, much like the Separation Walls that keep Palestinians apart from Palestinians, from Israelis, from the world, and often from their own land.
