From Mohamed Abd ElGawad’s ‘A Report on the Pussycat’
Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’
From Areej Gamal’s ‘Mariam, It’s Arwa’
Fiction
From Areej Gamal’s ‘Mariam, It’s Arwa’
Areej Gamal’s Sawiris-winning novel Mariam, It’s Arwa appeared at the end of last month in Addie Leak’s translation. The titular Arwa and Mariam meet near Cairo University during the 2011 Egyptian uprising, and the encounter changes them both.
From Saïd Khatibi’s ‘I Resist the River’s Course’
Saïd Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course — on the shortlist for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), with a winner set to be announced online April 9 — chronicles half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War to the early 1990s.
Poetry
Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’
“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”
New Poetry: Maha Al Aswad’s ‘Death in Six Images’
“They walk beneath the sky. As their arms extend. As they grow new arms. As they carry their children.’
Interviews
On the Field of Arabic Studies
Translator-scholar Jonas Elbousty talks with Roger Allen about his journey in the field of Arabic Studies.
Translation and Solidarity in Times of Imperial Mass Violence
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Elliott Colla look into two dimensions of translation, which Colla calls the solidaristic and the hegemonic, and the particular role translation has played in the US military.
Samar Yazbek on Redefining Collective Memory
“Sometimes, I believe that silence itself could carry meaning in the face of this barbarity. Sometimes, I tell myself that I’ll stop documenting atrocities and only write literature. But all of this only makes sense in the context of our desire for justice, our desire to preserve the true essence of humanity.”
In Focus
From the archives
‘When Darkness Falls’: On the Shortened, Brilliant Life of Iraqi Author Hayat Sharara
“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”
The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’
Another Road for Syrian Poetry
“The divide among poets has added a diaspora to the spatial diaspora, which scattered Syrians around the world.”