The grown-up participants are yet to cross the Allenby Bridge, but PalFest has already begun for its youngest festival-goers.
For the first time this year, PalFest kicks off with a one-day children’s festival at the Lajee Centre.
The admirable Poetry Translation Workshop continued its work (and play) with Arabic poetry this week, hosting a workshop on the Mauritanian poet Mubarka Bint al-Barra’.
Novelist Somaya Ramadan is among the authors who contributed to Arab World Books’ latest “literature and essay corner.”
Yesterday, Jadaliyya published a prose work by Yazbek that reflects events in Syria through the prism of a woman writer. The work, titled “Waiting for Death: I Will Not Carry Flowers to my Grave,” is not assigned a genre, but feels in parts like a prose poem, elsewhere an essay or a memoir fragment.
The Egyptian Ministry of Culture has a lot of shoveling ahead if it intends to shift the organization from one that stifles cultural developments into one that supports their flowering.
The Tahrir book fair—which experienced disappointing sales on its first day—closed early today because of the demonstrations.
Today in Al Masry Al Youm, I have a piece about “‘Revolutions everywhere’: Egypt’s novelists shift the red lines” discussing the past, present, and future of censorship and self-censorship in Egyptian literature.
Today on Jadaliyya, Sinan Antoon published translations of two Rashid Hussein poems to mark Youm al-Ard, or Palestinian Land Day.
The Saudi Gazette reported this week that sales of nonfiction (or “works of an intellectual bent”) beat out fiction at this year’s Riyadh book fair, which ran March 1-11.
