Poetry

The greatest literary show on Earth, we’re not. The General Egyptian Book Organization calls it a “massive literary festival,” and oh, it’s massive all right. The fair’s at the International […]

Yamani, who apparently is traveling, is the Egyptian writer missing from Kotob Khan’s Beirut39 reading and discussion. Sousan Hammad has a new (short) interview with him on the Beirut39 blog. […]

Last night, I attended the Beirut39 event at Kotob Khan (bookstore, although it feels strange to write “Book store bookstore”). We did not get to know the authors’ weights and […]

Arabic children’s-book publisher Kalimat has just received a 1.5-dirham ($408,000 U.S.) sponsorship from Gulftainer. This prestigious publishing house, exclusively for children, has seen just over 40 books into print. It […]

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 […]