Poetry

Sami Michael is an Iraqi-born, Israeli author. Claudia De Martino interviews him for Med Arab News. I was particularly interested in his switch-over from writing in Arabic to writing in […]

The Callaloo website is a wee bit behind; good that Laila Lalami put out the alert about the current edition featuring Middle Eastern/North African authors. Callaloo 32: 4 features poetry […]

I haven’t read Passage 62, just the summary up at Eurozine, but who can resist a phrase like “epic unwillingness,” as applied to the literature of a whole, long-lived, world-spanning […]

The Moroccan-born, Dutch-living Abdelkader Benali has won the prestigious E. du Perron prize for his novel, My Mother’s Voice. Yes, the novel was in Dutch (not Arabic, and isn’t this […]

Four men have won this year’s Sultan Bin Al Owais Cultural Foundation Awards: a poet, a novelist, a critic, and Galal Amin. (I’m not sure what to call him. An […]

There are three big books I’m looking forward to in 2010: Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth* (out from Aflame in February), Elias Khoury’s White Masks, (out from from Archipelago in April), and […]

The NYTimes has a “Notes from the Front Lines” piece up where you can ask John Burns about why Muslims “radicalize.” As my six-year-old would say, “What does it mean, […]

The Animists, Ibrahim al-Koni. February 2010. I think al-Koni’s Bleeding of the Stone is brilliant, a book of international standing, with things to tell us about Libya’s Tuareg people, about […]

Nomadics has translated three poems by Mohammed Dib: “Guardian Shadow” 1, 2, and 3. Dib is an Algerian writer much-lauded in France but little translated into English. Was an Algerian […]