Rebecca C. Johnson

Upcoming Events: ‘The Common’ Launch, ‘Making Film in Egypt,’ & more

A few upcoming online events.Continue Reading

Rebecca Johnson’s ‘Stranger Fictions: The History of the Novel in Arabic Translation’

“But when you think of it instead as an single literary field that contains a porous border between the translation and the original, then you start to think of translation as a form of novelistic production, as critique, as interpretation. It can even be theory.”Continue Reading

Saturday Events: ‘A Poem in Arabic, Not an Arabic Poem’

Dartmouth College’s open Middle Eastern literature lecture series starts on Wednesday, January 27, with a talk by Princeton’s Lara Harb.Continue Reading

Rewriting National History from a Personal Perspective: Hiyem Cheurfa on Arab Women’s Life Writing
This March, Hiyem Cheurfa’s new book Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Resistance appeared as part of Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature series. In it, Cheurfa takes us on a journey through a number of women’s memoirs, written in the context of twenty-first century uprisings. In this conversation, the author talks about the challenges and the difficulties of writing this book and how the texts she studied changed her life.
Lit & Found: ‘Sudanese Novels Through Time’
Over at Kotobli, they have posted a new list; this time, of Sudanese novels through time. The list was curated by Sudanese-American writer Razan Idris.
Najwa Barakat’s ‘Mister N’ Shortlisted for 2023 EBRD Literature Prize
Today, organizers announced the ten-book shortlist of translated literature for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize.
Iman Mersal & Robyn Creswell Make 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Longlist with ‘The Threshold’
Organizers of the Griffin Poetry Prize — one of the world’s biggest international poetry prizes — have announced this year’s ten-book longlist. Among them was Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, beautifully translated by Robyn Creswell.