“However, when my mother died, I started to look at things differently. Reality is harder than it seems for women, especially when they are weak and powerless. Women should stand out from the crowd to evade the destiny of others who are buried alive symbolically.”
“It is very dangerous what I’m going to say: Taha’s poetry about the Palestinian catastrophe lasts much more than Darwish’s poetry.”
The winner’s set to be announced at a ceremony in Edinburgh on August 21.
“This small team have put a lot of time and effort into making an innovative piece of drama, which may never be shown to the public in Egypt.”
“Facebook has broken the barrier that distance once put in our way. And a writer in the diaspora may have more of a following in Yemen than a writer who lives here. Plus the freedom that writers can enjoy in exile has a positive impact on Yemeni literature as a whole.”
“Paul Spera, dressed in a suit and red tie, looking as much like Donald Trump as it is possible to do for someone who has not spent 70 years sucking the souls of the less fortunate, blasts onto the stage.”
After D.C., Taha will be staged in London, at the Young Vic’s Maria studio, from July 5 to 15.
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”.
“My role? For years I would receive emails, hate mail from the Arab world. Now I get hate mail from Finns! Because I speak about racism, about refugees.”
“What you need to understand is that truth is directly connected to our wallets. And since your wallet is empty, and mine is full, that means the truth isn’t in your wallet. It’s in mine.”
“‘Personal Empathy Machine’ is an original performance work by Amal Omran, Hatem Hadawe and Kathryn Hamilton about Syrian prisons, Virtual Reality and the limits of empathy.”
“I feel very vulnerable as a teacher. Many of my fears around that came out in my play ZAFIRA. She was a teacher who ended up in the ‘Arab and Muslim Internment Camps.'”
