“Translators have approached me in the past about translating my work into English, but it didn’t come to anything because I wasn’t comfortable with some of their editorial suggestions, such as amplifying a particular aspect of the text or emphasizing an element to which I hadn’t given prominence.”
Read more“One of the trickiest, most mysterious secrets of the Arabic language is the root h-l-m.”
Read more“You often spoke to me of a blind writer, who was fascinated by mazes and who smiled at even the most dreadful nightmares, while you walked, leaning on my arm—as if I would believe your talk about things that were receding before your eyes day by day.”
Read moreLast week, there was quite a flap in the Egyptian literary world as the country’s State Incentive Award went to Tareq Imam’s The Serenity of Killers (Dar Merit)—but then was snatched back on the pretext that Imam had already won a (Sawiris, second-place) award for the book.
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