Bilal Orfali: Walking in the Steps of Poets: Courtly Themes in Early Sufism
2022-03-22 17:00 - 20:00 (Africa/Cairo)
As the second lecture of the DVP Bayard Dodge Sprin 2022 Lecture series, Bilal Orfali will give a talk in Arabic on “Walking in the Steps of Poets: Courtly Themes in Early Sufism/على خطى الشعراء: ثيمات شعرية في التصوّف المبكّر”.
The lecture will be in person, but livestreamed via Zoom.

Michael Cooperson: Learning Arabic Backwards
2022-03-23 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York)
Learning Arabic Backwards: Was It Absolutely Frightening?

CMES is pleased to present the 2022 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic & Islamic Studies Lecture Series with
Michael Cooperson
Professor of Arabic, University of California, Los Angeles
Register in advance: https://bit.ly/3GVY4Bc
Please note: This lecture will be online via Zoom, and everyone wishing to attend should register using the link above. Limited in-person seating for Harvard students and faculty may become available. If so, Harvard students and faculty who have registered will be notified of the campus location for the talk.
Arabic has been acquiring new speakers for some 1400 years. Beginning around 1120, many learners studied the language by reading one of the complex texts ever written in it. Full of puns, allusions, riddles, lipograms, and palindromes, al-Hariri’s Impostures can baffle even proficient speakers. Even more oddly, the seventeenth-century Dutch Orientalists who introduced the work to Europe also presented it as a teaching text. How could Impostures serve that purpose, and what does the answer tell us about the dissemination of hegemonic languages in pre- and early modern times?
Michael Cooperson is an American scholar and translator of Arabic literature. Cooperson studied at Harvard University and the American University of Cairo, and is currently a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published two monographs on early Abbasid cultural history: Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma’mun and Al-Mamun (Makers Of The Muslim World).
He has translated a number of works from Arabic and French including: Impostures (al-Ḥarīrī); Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture; Ibn al-Jawzi’s Manaqib al-Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Virtues of the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal); Khairy Shalaby’s The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets; and Jurji Zaydan’s The Caliph’s Heirs — Brothers at War: the Fall of Baghdad. In 2021, he won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for translation from Arabic to English. His other interests include Maltese language and culture.

Queer Trans/Nationalisms: Love & Rage in Times of Atrocity ft. Zeyn Joukhadar and Randa Jarrar in Conversation
2022-03-25 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London)
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won both the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He guest edited Mizna’s 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue and is a mentor with the Periplus Collective.

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is also a performer who has appeared in independent films and in the TV show RAMY. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Virtual Book Launch: Hilal Chouman's 'Huzn fi qalbi'
2022-03-25 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Lebanese novelist Hilal Chouman will be in conversation with Rasha Hilwi on the occasion of the launch of his new book, حزن في قلبي. The book is coming out with Berlin-based publisher Khan Aljanub. The event will be livestreamed on their Facebook page.

Syrian Poets Today and Elsewhere
2022-03-26 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Join RAWI for the first gathering of its kind, of Syrian poets writing today and from elsewhere in the diaspora. With a poetry film by Ghayath Almadhoun.
Born in Copenhagen to Syrian-Finnish parents, Nathalie Khankan is the author of QUIET ORIENT RIOT (2020 Omnidawn), recipient of the 2021 California Book Award.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Redolent, a book-arts collaboration with Colombian artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, is now available from Singing Saw Press. Social Media: Twitter: @matuk_farid, Instagram: @whaevahuhuh
Khawla Dunia is a Syrian writer and poet – born in Damascus – BA in economics from Damascus University – political and feminist activist – who left Syria in mid-2013 – residing between Germany and Turkey. Khawla is currently working as a gender consultant with the Euro-Mediterranean Feminist Initiative. A poetry book published 2012: Overhasty Poems Before the Missile Falls, a collection of poems published in German, Italian, English and Arabic in books and websites.
Mohja Kahf is a professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995. She has authored a novel and three books of poetry, including Hagar Poems and My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit.
Lubna Safi was born in Detroit and grew up in the Midwest. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with poetry, Lubna also writes fiction, literary criticism, and lyric essays. Your Blue and the Quiet Lament is her debut poetry collection. Twitter: @lubna_saf
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish poet born in Damascus in 1979 and emigrated to Sweden in 2008. He has published four poetry collections in Arabic and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. Right now, he lives in between Berlin & Stockholm. http://www.ghayathalmadhoun.com

afikra Book Club: Author Zeyn Joukhadar
2022-03-29 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join this interview with author Zeyn Joukhadar on their book The Thirty Names of Night as part of the afikra Book Club series.
Synopsis:
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

afikra Conversations: Youssef Rakha
2022-03-30 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join this interview with novelist, essayist, poet & journalist Youssef Rakha as part of the afikra Conversations series.
Bio: Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. His interests include Arab porn and the possibility of a post-Muslim perspective. His first two novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles appeared in English in early 2015. Frequently anthologized and translated into many languages, he has written widely on Arabic literature and Egyptian history. Youssef’s 2006 photo travelogue Beirut Shi Mahal was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 Festival in 2010. His first novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkey’s translation, and his third, Paulo, was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

Hosam Aboul-Ela: Nonfiction in the Novels of Sonallah Ibrahim
2022-03-31 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis)
Academic, translator, and writer Hosam Aboul-Ela will give a talk on “Nonfiction in the Novels of Sonallah Ibrahim: The Horizons of Translation” at Indiana University on Thursday, March 31, 2022, at 5pm EDT.
The talk will be in-person, but a livestream will be provided via Zoom.
Find more info on Hosam’s Twitter account and register here.

afikra Conversations: Professor Huda Fakhreddine
2022-04-05 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join this interview with the professor of Arabic literature Huda Fakhreddine for the afikra Conversations series.
Huda Fakhreddine’s work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

A Conversation With Hisham Bustani
2022-04-14 11:30 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
Author Hisham Bustani will talk about his new short story collection The Monotonous Chaos of Existence at this virtual event hosted by University of Michigan – Dearborn.

afikra Conversations: Omar Berrada
2022-04-14 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join this interview with writer, translator, curator and director of Dar al-Ma’mun Omar Berrada as part of the afikra Conversations series.

Bio: 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.

The Arabic Novel in the Gulf: Between Documentation and Fiction
2022-04-19 12:30 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
Jokha Alharthi, Omani author and recipient of the 2019 International Booker Prize, in conversation with Mona Kareem.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, The Fares Center for Mediterranean Studies, and The Fletcher School.

MENAWA Reading Group: 'Planet of Clay' by Samar Yazbek
2022-04-21 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London)
Join MENAWAPoco’s April 2022 virtual book discussion, of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay (tr. Leri Price) at 5pm UK time. To participate, email them at menawapocoreads@gmail.com and follow them on Twitter to see all updates.

What to The Slave is The Arabic Novel?
2022-04-22 13:30 - 14:30 (America/New_York)
Talk with Dr. Mona Kareem, CHAT Postdoctoral Fellow.
About the Talk:
Outside of colonial archives, histories of Indian Ocean slavery have mainly been carried by novelists from South Asia, Africa, and more recently the Arabian Peninsula (aka Arab Gulf). In this talk, Kareem discusses a relatively new interest among Arabic novelists to compose microhistories of oppressed groups such as enslaved, stateless, migrant, and displaced peoples, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. This focus in the contemporary Arabic novel, at once ambitious and problematic, has played an instrumental role in bringing issues of race, ethnicity, and minority to the forefront of public debates. Kareem’s talk will walk us through several contemporary Arabic novels written by Arab and Afro-Arab writers to closely examine what roles an author’s positionality, politics, and aesthetics play when tackling stories of enslavement and their place in national history and imaginary. Kareem argues that Arab authors often resort to colonial romance fiction to test race relations, while Black authors are more interested in formulating a neo-slave narrative tradition.

TMR Bookgroup: Hisham Bustani's “The Monotonous Chaos of Existence”
2022-04-24 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/London)
The Markaz Review invites you to participate in their monthly bookgroup conversation, in which authors and/or translators join during the second half of the hour. On Sunday, April 24th, writer Hisham Bustani and translator Maia Tabet will join at 1:30 pm Eastern.
To receive the Zoom link for this free online event, simply email books@themarkaz.org.

Free Event / 1 pm Eastern/18:00 UK/19:00 CET

Roundtable on Literary Translation
2022-04-26 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Please register your interest to attend the forthcoming Roundtable on Literary Translation organised by the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (University of Warwick) using this link. They have a very exciting panel with practising literary translators as well as representatives of the publishing and literary world:

Alexandra Büchler (Director of Literature Across Frontiers, LAF)
Will Forrester (Translation and International Manager at English Pen)
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (practising literary translator working from German, Arabic and Russian into English)
Ayça Türkoglu (practising literary translator working from German and Turkish into English
Sawad Hussain (practising literary translator working with the Arabic language)

The event will take place in a hybrid format on Tuesday 26 April 2-4pm UK time in OC1.06 and on MS Teams.
Please note that you will need to register your interest through this form by Monday 25 April (midnight UK time). You will receive further details about accessing the seminar via Teams on the day of the talk.

Agitated Air – Poems After Ibn Arabi
2022-04-27 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/London)
Reading & Conversation with Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger, and Marina Warner. Organised by Beatrice Bottomley (Warburg Institute PhD).
Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjuman Al-ashwaq, or ‘The Interpreter of Desires’, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse.
Agitated Air (forthcoming in February 2022 from Tenement Press) is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.
Marina Warner writes of the collection ‘Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless. […] This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.’
In this online reading, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger will give voice to these poems, bringing to life the imagery and sounds that punctuated their exchange. The reading will be followed by a discussion between the poet-translators and Marina Warner.

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. Her essays, poetry, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely—in Harper’s, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Apollo and elsewhere. Current projects include a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights (W. W. Norton) and a translation of the poems of Al-Khansa (NYU Press). After five years in Istanbul, she lives in Paris.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English recently moved from Cape Town to Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, and others. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book Of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).
Professor Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories, as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairy tales. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
FREE VIA ZOOM. PLEASE BOOK IN ADVANCE.

afikra Conversations: Publisher Michel Moushabeck
2022-04-27 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join afikra as they interview founder of Interlink Publishing Michel Moushabeck on the afikra Conversations series.
Michel S. Moushabeck is a writer, editor, translator, publisher, and musician of Palestinian descent. He is the founder of Interlink Publishing, a 35-year-old, Massachusetts-based independent publishing house specializing in fiction-in-translation, history and current affairs, illustrated children’s books, and award-winning international cookbooks. He is the author of several books including, Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa. Most recently, he co-edited the winter issue of the Massachusetts Review focusing on Mediterranean literature and contributed a piece to Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press). He is the recipient of NYU’s Founder’s Day Award for outstanding scholarship, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Alex Odeh Award and The Palestinian Heritage Foundation Achievement Award. He serves on the board of directors of Media Education Foundation and on the board of trustees of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). He is also a founding member and director of the Boston-based Layaali Arabic Music Ensemble. He has performed at concert halls worldwide and plays percussion on the music soundtrack of an award-winning BBC documentary on Islam, which aired as part of the series The People’s Century. His recording credits include two albums: Lost Songs of Palestine and Folk Songs and Dance Music from Turkey and the Arab World. He lectures frequently on Arabic music and literature-in-translation. He plays music almost daily; is a keen mountain climber; and is a rather obsessive collector of jazz and world music, world percussion instruments, books, old maps, and contemporary art. He has three daughters—all book editors—and lives in Leverett, Massachusetts with his longtime German partner who works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a leading expert on East German film.

Translating Picture Books
2022-04-28 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Join Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Daniel Hahn, Lawrence Schimel, and Helen Wang as they answer questions about being a translator and the translation of picture books. Their translations are highlighted in the Reading Library exhibition, Read the World: Picture Books and Translation.

Translation and Cultural Exchange - Sheikh Zayed Book Award
2022-04-28 14:00 - 15:15 (Europe/London)
In its ambition to connect with wider academic audiences, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award is organising a series of four events between April and June in collaboration with SOAS, University of London, famous for its commitment to and its reach in the global south. Professor Wen-chin Ouyang, with her connections in North America, Europe and East Asia, will host and moderate the events, bringing to this series an additional multilingual and cross-regional flare. The interlocutors and guests include shortlisted and invited authors, translators, cultural thought leaders and scholars from around the world. All events will be bilingual (Arabic/English) and online.
This first event will feature:

Prof. Wen-chin Ouyang (moderator)
Nawal Nasrallah – scholar, award-winning researcher and food writer, 2022 SZBA shortlistee for the category Translation
Katharine Halls – literary translator, 2021 recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for the translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed
Professor Wang Youyong – Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University

Oil and Arabic Literature in the Cold War — A Talk by Elizabeth Holt
2022-05-02 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Chicago)
When British Petroleum was looking to have their film The Third River translated into Arabic, they turned to Palestinian writer and painter Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who worked as an editor for the Iraq Petroleum Company’s influential in-house industry and culture publications. Better known for translating T.S. Eilot’s The Wasteland and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury into Arabic, Jabra’s correspondence also frequently appears in the archives of United States Cold War projects, such as Franklin Books and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. This talk will explore the intersection of oil, modernism, and empire, to consider how pipelines and energy infrastructure curate Arabic literature.

Elizabeth M. Holt is a literary historian and serves as associate professor of Arabic at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she co-directs the Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic programs. She is finishing a new book entitled “Imperious Plots: Cultural Infiltration and Arabic Literature in the Cold War,” and has recently published articles on resistance literature and the Cold War in Beirut in the Journal of Palestine Studies, and on Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s CCF-published novel Season of Migration to the North in Research in African Literatures. Drawing upon extensive archival research, the book-length study shows that Arabic literature was a pivotal terrain of the cultural Cold War, through which the CIA infiltrated the increasingly Soviet-sponsored (if often Mao-inspired) cultural production of the Third World. The project has received generous support from the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin’s Europe in the Middle East/the Middle East in Europe (EUME) program, and Bard College.
Holt is a founding member of Bard’s Translation and Translatability Initiative, and is the author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (2017). The book reads early Arabic novels of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Beirut and Cairo as fictions of global finance in the Eastern Mediterranean. Research was generously supported through a Fulbright IIE Grant to Cairo, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the American Research Center in Cairo, numerous smaller grants from Columbia University and Bard College, and a sabbatical from Bard spent as a research associate at the American University of Beirut. This funding allowed for extensive research in libraries and archives in Cairo, Beirut, Nantes, Aix-en-Provence, and in the New York area. She is at work on two new projects: a materialist study of ‘petroculture’ and the Arabic novel; and Arabic at Sea, on maritime mercantilism and Arabic storytelling from the fourteenth century.
This event is organized by the MENA Interdisciplinary Working Group on Institutional Histories of Aesthetic Forms.
This is a hybrid event, register here to participate via Zoom.

Book Launch: You Have Not Yet Been Defeated
2022-05-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Join Seven Stories Press and Haymarket Books for a launch of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s important new book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

About this event

“The text you are holding is living history.” — Naomi Klein, from the foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated
Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade.
To celebrate the launch of the first English language collection of his essays, social media posts, and interviews, Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif—herself an activist, filmmaker, and former political prisoner of the Sisi regime in Egypt—will be joined by Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for a conversation on the wide range of subjects covered in this important new book.
To order a copy of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated visit: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781644212455
***Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and live captioning will be provided.***

The Common: Issue 23 Virtual Launch Party
2022-05-04 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York)
On May 4th at 5pm EDT, join The Common for the virtual celebration of Issue 23! We welcome fiction writer Fernando Flores, poet Tina Cane, Palestinian writer Eyad Barghuthy, and Arabic translator Nashwa Gowanlock for brief readings and conversation about place, culture, and translation. The event will be hosted by the magazine’s editor in chief Jennifer Acker, in partnership with the Amherst College Creative Writing Center and Arts at Amherst Initiative.
Please Register in Advance for the Virtual Event. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.

The Markaz Review: Novelist Rabih Alameddine in conversation with Dima Alzayat
2022-05-06 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
Rabih Alameddine, winner of the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for his latest novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, will be in conversation with short story author Dima Alzayat (Alligator & Other Stories) for The Markaz Review, on Friday, May 6, 2 pm ET (19:00 UK). Zoom participants will be able to jot down their questions in the chat for Alameddine and Alzayat.
In her TMR review of The Wrong End of the Telescope, Dima Alzayat points out that, “Alameddine plunges headfirst into important questions about empathy and fiction, armed with his signature sharp sarcasm and acerbic humor. ‘Every idiot thinks they’re a writer, they’re not;’ he proclaims in the book’s opening pages. ‘Every dullard thinks they have a tale to tell; they don’t.’ Alameddine is not taking aim at literature he simply dislikes or disagrees with — his is a much more interesting pursuit: What is the point of fiction? What does it do? What can it yield? These queries lie at the heart of his novel, one that takes as its subject the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean and those who wait to receive them on the other side.”
Born in Amman, Jordan, Lebanese American writer and painter Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize.

Dima Alzayat was born in Damascus, grew up in San Jose, California and lives in Manchester, in the UK. She studied fiction writing and has won numerous awards. In her TMR review of Alzayat’s Alligator & Other Stories, Malu Halasa suggested that her story collection “starts a different conversation about Arab belonging and assimilation in America, through the prism of Syrian experience. An astute observer of worlds both old and new, Alzayat listened hard to her elders, recognized inconsistencies and digs deep into uncomfortable no-go areas. She is a formidable new voice in understanding the complexities of race and identity.”
This online event is free to the public. RSVPs are required. REGISTER HERE.

You Haven't Been Defeated: Book Talk with Sanaa Seif
2022-05-07 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
A book talk with Egyptian revolutionary Sanaa Seif, former political prisoner and sister of Alaa Abd El-Fattah with renowned independent Egyptian journalist, Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

Gaza Poet Mosab Abu Toha, in conversation with Mary Karr
2022-05-07 20:00 - 21:30 (Europe/London)
The Markaz Review and City Lights in conjunction with the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance celebrate the publication of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, by Mosab Abu Toha, published by City Lights Books.
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a device that is capable of accessing the Internet.
Takes place at 12 noon Pacific/3 pm Eastern/20:00 UK/21:00 CET

afikra Book Club: Author Naomi Shihab Nye
2022-05-10 19:00 - 20:00 (Asia/Beirut)
Join afikra as they interview author of “The Turtle of Michigan” and “The Turtle of Oman” Naomi Shihab Nye on the afikra Book Club series.
Praised by the Horn Book as “both quiet and exhilarating,” “The Turtle of Oman” by the acclaimed poet and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye follows Aref Al-Amri as he says goodbye to everything and everyone he loves in his hometown of Muscat, Oman, as his family prepares to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. This book was awarded a 2015 Middle East Book Award, was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, and includes extra material by the author.
The Turtle of Michigan is a deft and accessible novel that follows a young boy named Aref as he travels from Muscat, Oman, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and adjusts to a new life and a new school in the United States. A wonderful pick for young middle grade readers and fans of Other Words for Home and Billy Miller Makes a Wish.

BCLT Research Seminar with Michael Cooperson - French Word Games, “Untranslatable” Arabic, and Global English
2022-05-11 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London)
Al-Hariri’s Impostures is a twelfth-century collection of fifty tales written entirely in rhyme. Because of the rhyme, not to mention the riddles, puns, lipograms, and rare vocabulary, it has routinely been called untranslatable. Yet translators into Hebrew, German, and Russian have succeeded in re-creating it in their languages. A new English translation draws on the work of the OuLiPo, the French literary collective, to attempt the same in English.
Michael Cooperson is Professor of Arabic at University of California, Los Angeles. He studied at Harvard and the American University in Cairo, and taught at Harvard, the Middlebury School of Arabic and Dartmouth College before joining UCLA in 1995. He has published the monographs Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophet in the Age of al-Ma’mūn (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Al Ma’mun (OneWorld Books, 2005). He has also translated a number of works from Arabic and French, including Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture (Syracuse University Press, 2001), Khairy Shalaby’s The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets (American University in Cairo Press, 2010) and Jurji Zaydan’s Brothers at War (Zaidan Foundation, 2012). In 2009-10 he was Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and 2015-2017 he was Senior Research Fellow for the Library of Arabic Literature, New York University Abu Dhabi. In 2021, he won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for translation from Arabic to English.

Getting our Hands Dirty: What's so special about feminist translation (and translating feminists)?
2022-05-12 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London)
The late great maverick Moroccan feminist writer Malika Moustadraf died at just 37 years old in 2006. Persecuted throughout her short life for writing about sexual violence and the patriarchy in her fiction, the key details of her life story remain contested. So what are the challenges of translating a dead writer of such freighted work? And what issues must we take into account when attempting to represent someone like her in English in 2022?
With Alice Guthrie, Helen Vassallo and Majida Ibrahim.
Zoom link:
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/97259978936?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 972 5997 8936
Password: [REDACTED]

Arab Literature and Culture in the West and Beyond - Sheikh Zayed Book Award
2022-05-12 14:00 - 15:15 (Europe/London)
In its ambition to connect with wider academic audiences, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award is organising a series of four events between April and June in collaboration with SOAS, University of London, famous for its commitment to and its reach in the global south. Professor Wen-chin Ouyang, with her connections in North America, Europe and East Asia, will host and moderate the events, bringing to this series an additional multilingual and cross-regional flare. The interlocutors and guests include shortlisted and invited authors, translators, cultural thought leaders and scholars from around the world. All events will be bilingual (Arabic/English) and online.
This panel discussion will feature:

Prof. Wen-chin Ouyang (moderator)
Michael Cooperson – author and translator, professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, 2021 SZBA winner for the category Translation
Robert Irwin, Middle East editor of TLS
Huda Fakhreddine – Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of
Pennsylvania and literary translator
