MUSINGS of a YOUNG WOMAN, by May Ziadeh, translated and edited by a collective of women and published by Arablit Books, will be available October 2026. You can pre-order now to support the project.
The English translation of Sawanih Fatat (Musings of a Young Woman) by May Ziadeh arrives as the second title in ArabLit’s ERASED, NOT FORGOTTEN series, following Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman). If Azzam emerged as a literary voice in the wake of the 1948 Nakba, then Ziadeh’s prose reaches further back into the early tremors of the Arab Nahda, to ask a question that still feels dangerously current: what does it mean for a woman to write herself into existence?
Neither memoir nor manifesto, Sawanih is a genre-defying book that combines essays, reflections, poems, even a microplay. It speaks in a voice that is at once singular and collective: “We young women who write,” insisting on women’s right to think and question, to be read as more than an auxiliary to the human species.
You can also subscribe to weekly installments of Musings of a Young Woman in newsletter form here.
More on May:
May Goes On: (Re)-Introducing May Ziadeh
An Apology to May Ziadeh
May Ziadeh’s ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
