Poetry

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 […]

Although largely unknown in the West, Taha Hussein is one of the towering figures of Egyptian literature. The elimination of his The Days—a foundational piece of Egyptian prose—from school curricula […]

Now here’s a literary prize not everyone will want on their resume: The Ghaddafi Prize, awarded this year to writer and critic Dr. Jaber Asfour. Asfour also is director of […]

Novels may not be a Western invention—a number of scholars call Ibn Tufail the first novelist; his Hayy ibn Yaqdhan likely influenced Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—regardless, it was Westerners who […]

After all the kerfuffle about how many Arabic Booker nominees use the girls’ room instead of the boys’ (and how this is proof of literary discrimination), I appreciate Syrian author […]