0 – PRE-ORDER: Musings of a Young Woman by May Ziadeh

Description

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 a paperback copy 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.

As scholar Marilyn Booth argues, Ziadeh’s work participates in a form of autobiographical writing that is “surreptitious, muted, or sketchy,” embedded within genres that do not announce themselves as self-narration. What emerges is not a single, stable “I,” but a shifting one: sometimes plural “we young women,” sometimes intimate “you, at the window,” sometimes displaced into the stories of others.

This new translation of Sawanih Fatat, brought forth by a collective of women translators and editors, echoes the text’s own opening gesture: a “we” that writes, reads, and reclaims together. There is something fitting, almost poetic, about a team of skilled, educated women carrying forward a text that wrestles, again and again, with what it means for women to write, to be read, to be seen. It is also, inevitably, an act of interpretation, one that must grapple with the nuances of Ziadeh’s prose; its shifts in tone moving between candor and sarcasm.

Ziadeh once expressed the hope that someone might do her justice after her death; we took it as an invitation and gladly accepted it.

The collective includes: Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Dana Al Shahbari, M Lynx Qualey, Mennan Salih, Boutheina Khaldi, Marilyn Booth, Chloe Bordewich, Meriem Essaoudy, Fatima El-Kalay, Layla AlAmmar, Ranya Abdelrahman, Alaa Alqaisi, Imane Amraoui, Allison Armijo, Anam Zafar, Emma Hardy, and Leonie Böttiger.