“Bookended by chapters on preparatory perfumes, incenses, medicinal oils, antiperspirant powders, and after-meal hand soaps, this comprehensive culinary journey is a feast for all the senses.”
Thus far, each issue has centered on a theme “that is an element of Saudi culture”: Arabic coffee (summer 2015), ismik (winter 2016), and awlad (fall 2016).
“In my experience what tends to happen is — first you like someone’s work, then you meet them and it puts you off their existence!”
Iraq is often portrayed as a place that has always been violent and always will be. By germinating new narrative possibilities, Iraq + 100 provides new ways of imagining the next century that go beyond seeing the present as eternal.
“My writer colleagues whether in Egypt or the Arab world are fighters and schemers and I’m happy to be part of this contradictory, vagabond, incongruous mosaic in the middle of the present ruins of the greater Middle East.”
Very politely, they also suggest: “If you can, please follow our writing guidelines.”
The spark for the ten-play collection was Ibrahim El-Husseini′s Comedy of Sorrows, a work that Maggor helped translate and stage in 2012. Comedy of Sorrows, part of the first wave of post-2011 plays, was brought into English not for a general audience, but for an academic conference at Harvard University entitled “Women Making Democracy”.
He’s an architect who lost his faith in art and himself after the 1992 earthquake, which sparked a crisis on both personal and professional levels. This may explain the novel’s loose and fragile structure, parallel to the loose and fragile buildings destroyed by the quake.
The twelve longlisted titles were chosen from among a massive 274 nominations from 29 countries.
