‘Blood Feast’: Alice Guthrie with Omar Berrada

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with translator Alice Guthrie to discuss and celebrate the release of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf. She will be in conversation with writer Omar Berrada.

Malika Moustadraf (1969–2006) is a feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan literature, celebrated for her stark interrogation of gender and sexuality in North Africa. Blood Feast is the complete collection of Moustadraf’s published short fiction: haunting, visceral stories by a master of the genre. A teenage girl suffers through a dystopian rite of passage, a man with kidney disease makes desperate attempts to secure treatment, and a mother schemes to ensure her daughter passes a virginity test. Delighting in vibrant sensory detail and rich slang, Moustadraf takes an unflinching look at the gendered body, social class, illness, double standards, and desire, as lived by a diverse cast of characters. Blood Feast is a sharp provocation to patriarchal power and a celebration of the life and genius of one of Morocco’s preeminent writers.

Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, and curator, specializing in contemporary Arabic writing. Her work often focuses on subaltern voices and activist art. She is currently compiling the first ever anthology of LGBTQIA+ Arabic writing, set to appear in parallel Arabic and English editions. She teaches literary translation at the University of Exeter and the University of Birmingham.

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. His work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, a volume on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016), and La Septième Porte, Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema (2020). His writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.