In the approach to Palestine Festival of Literature, we’ll be running a few preview-interviews with the authors traveling along for this year’s six-city festival. Among them is award-winning UK poet Tom Warner. This is his first time with PalFest.
This year’s Palestine Festival of Literature, popularly known as PalFest, will take place in six cities across historic Palestine from May 23 to 30.
Blogger, editor, cartoonist and Fulbright fellow Jonathan Guyer(@mideastXmidwest) will be talking cartoons at Helwan University on May 14.
“The Corsair” — written by Qatari journalist, engineer, and author Abdul Aziz al-Mahmoud — is built to be both edifying and widely read, in the tradition of one of the all-time most popular Arab novelists: Jurji Zaidan.
This year’s fest certainly had a moment that crystallized around its contradictions: when Salman Rushdie, giving a speech about courage and artistic risk, told a dissenter to shut the fuck up.
On May 11, if you’re one of the 28 million who live — collectively — in Cairo or New York City, then get yourself to one of these events celebrating and exploring the Egyptian graphic novel.
There have been a number of interviews with the (charming) winner of this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) — Saud al-Sanousi, for his The Bamboo Stalk — in English-language media or English translation.
This past Saturday, Suneela Mubayi was at the PEN World Voices Festival, for the talk “All That’s Left to You: Palestinian Writers in Conversation,” with novelists Adania Shibli and Randa Jarrar and poet Najwan Darwish.
Now that I’ve returned from the fair, I’ve been reflecting on how difficult it is to say what “localization” and “roots” mean in a country that’s 90-percent non-Emirati. This 90 percent — of Pakistanis, Egyptians, French, Malaysians, Indians, Filipinos, Lebanese, others — may contribute vibrantly to the country’s development. Yet they cannot, as things currently stand, be considered locals.
