Short Fiction in Translation: Azher Jirjees’s ‘The Reed Horse’
The Arabic original of this short story appears in the 2017 edition of Azher Jirjees’s collection The Sweetmaker.
Azher Jirjees
Azher Jirjees: Writing the Country That Lives In Him
Last month, International Prize for Arabic Fiction judges announced that Iraqi writer Azher Jirjees had been shortlisted for the 2025 prize for his The Valley of the Butterflies, a novel set in Baghdad between 1999 and 2024 that tells the story of Aziz Awad, a government archivist who loses his job and struggles to keep his small family alive. Here, Jirjees talks about the power of satire, writing in exile, the Iraqi literary scene, and about how he and other Iraqi writers wanted to make “our voices heard, mine and those of my generation, who had lived through the ordeal from beginning to end.”
Summer Reads: ‘The Limping Couch’
“It wasn’t just the Obesity Control Police. Everyone in town constantly challenged my humanity because of my weight. They called me an animal so many times that, for a moment, I thought I’d become one.”
An Excerpt from Azher Jirjees’s IPAF-shortlisted ‘The Stone of Happiness’
And so it was that—after a lifetime spent as peaceable as a hen—I found myself face to face with a hired killer.
Launching Today: ArabLit Quarterly Summer 2020, the CRIME Issue
The Summer 2020 issue of ArabLit Quarterly — our issue of summer insight & delight — is now available.