With her debut novel, Tunisian author and translator Fathia Debech won a prestigious Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel.
Friday Finds: Excerpt from ‘My Mother’s Glasses, a Tunisian Prison Memoir’
"It was Friday, May 9, 1975. We had just ended a hunger strike a few days earlier."
Bulaq 58, ‘The Pillar of Salt,’ & Book-club Poll
Bulaq Episode 58 centers on Albert Memmi's The Pillar of Salt.
Friday Finds: Ines Abassi’s ‘The Key’
"The last key I carried /dangles alone on the key rack / like a corpse at the gallows"
Tunisian Author and Philosopher Kamel Zoghbani Dies at 55
Tunisian writer and philosopher Kamel Zoghbani (1965-2020) died on Monday, September 14, after a sudden heart attack. He was 55.
#WiTMonth Poetry: Amina Saïd’s ‘I Live Here in the Basement of the Gare de Lyon’
"you come from somewhere else too he says / and the stones moan with absence / the earth stops turning / once yes once I also had a country"
Tunisian Novelist and Essayist Albert Memmi Dies at 99
"Many will paint Memmi as a Tunisian author to lend credibility to an imagined version of early 20th c. Tunisia: cosmopolitan, multi-confessional. In my opinion this is not only inaccurate, it runs against Memmi's thought on the nuances of belonging and the workings of colonialism."
Tunisian Author and Activist Lina Ben Mhenni, (1983-2020)
She wrote up until the very end -- about her illness, about Baghdad, and about Tunisian politics -- publishing her final post on the popular "A Tunisian Girl" blog Sunday.
2019 Golden Comar to Tarek Chibani’s ‘Lady Essayida’
The main Arabic prize went to Tarek Chibani for his novel للا السيدة (Lady Essayida).
Lara Vergnaud Wins PEN/Heim to Translate Yamen Manai’s ‘The Ardent Swarm’
In Yamen Manai’s prizewinning third novel, the devastation of a beekeeper’s hive by a hornet attack serves as a microcosm for the aftermath of Tunisia’s 2011 Jasmine Revolution.
An Excerpt from Inès Abbassi’s ‘Bourguiba House’
I answered her, my eyes fixed on a pile of clothes, deep in thought, “I’ve got to find the dress, the dress is the key, it’s the ax that will cut down poverty right from its roots.”
‘A Confession,’ by Tunisian Poet Sami Messelmani
"their bright lights
infect me with an intellectual insomnia
shrinking my soul,
and blinding my eyes,"
