The forthcoming collection Bidayàt, ed. Aldo Nicosia, brings together the openings of twenty-two different Arabic novels; these are translated into Italian by Nicosia with the help of two other translators. For ArabLit, Nicosia sat down in front of the mirror and conducted a somewhat impertinent interview with himself about the project.  Interviewer: Mr. Nicosia, why Bidayàt? What new does it add to the Italian cultural landscape? Aldo Nicosia: Bidayàt is an anthology that, as its title suggests (it means “beginnings”), covers only a long incipit, or I’d better say, the opening pages of ..read more

In the Fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly, we focused on FOOTBALL, and especially its many literary manifestations. Among these are the chants sung at matches; the issue brought together diverse chants from Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine. In each country, the football chants reflect not just the fans’ relationship with their team, but with the wider society and world. In the two chants author Ameer Hamad selected and translated for this issue — from the Hilal Al-Quds Club in Jerusalem and Hapoel Umm al-Fahm FC in Umm al-Fahm — it’s not just important to win, but t ..read more

By Tugrul Mende This month, a second of Huzama Habayeb’s novels was published in English translation, this time by MacLehose Press. Before the Queen Falls Asleep was translated by Kay Heikkinen and centers on the life story of a girl named Jihad—so named because her parents wanted a boy. The novel shades in a portrait of Palestinian life in exile, and it’s told with humor and intimacy, as the family must travel from Kuwait to Jordan and later to Dubai.  This is the second of Huzama’s novels you’ve translated. The first was the Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning Velvet, which was publishe ..read more

The two introductory texts below — on life, writing, and translation — appear in the newly published trilingual collection Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets. By Golan Haji Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker In the mid-1990s, I often went to the library of the American Cultural Center in Damascus, located at the foot of Mount Qassioun, in a calm little street beneath the shadows of fragrant Peruvian pepper-trees. Alone, I dove among the enchanting words of poets I had barely heard of, armed with the huge tome of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Reading occupied most ..read more

This piece appeared in our Spring 2021 SONG issue.  By Shaimaa Abulebda It was last year when a short video posted to Palestinian singer-songwriter Terez Sliman’s Facebook page went viral. The video features Sliman and Portuguese musician Sofia Adriana Portugal on a boat, cruising the Nile River in Egypt. They sit atop a table, facing one another as they tap rhythmically while singing “Ya Talei’en El Jabal” (Hey, You, Climbing Up the Mountain) and “Las Panaderas” (Women Bakers). Within a matter of days, the Arabic-Spanish folksong fusion had spread across different social media platforms ..read more

The Drunken Donkey Dr. Abuelgasim Gour Translated by Nassir al-Sayeid al-Nour Among all the donkeys, my aunt Um Makhayan’s donkey was the one that enjoyed gnawing on the Saheb tree, which flourished to the west of our neighborhood. The tree was green in all seasons: green in summer, and green at the peak of the rainy season, too. Hers was a gray donkey with a thick neck, the kind of donkey that’s called adubalwi in western Sudan. The donkey would head off every day to gnaw the Saheb tree until its front teeth had engraved a donkey-sign on the tree’s trunk—no other donkey could have ..read more

APRIL 4, 2024 — Organizers of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award announced their 2024 winners today. The list was led by the high-profile literature category, which went to Reem Bassiouney’s fast-paced, fights-and-romance-filled historical novel, Al Halwani: The Fatimid Trilogy. The sweeping historical three-parter travels back in time to medieval Egypt. Organizers write, in a prepared statement, that Bassiouney “seeks to shed light on the Egyptian character with narratives that intertwine poetry, architecture, and mythology, while underscoring the human dimension. The author works to construct the ..read more

Najem Wali’s 2024 novel My Romantic Aunt, published by Rewayat, follows a man’s relationship with his boundary-breaking aunt. From ‘My Romantic Aunt: Her friends, Her Relationships, and Me’ By Najem Wali Translated by Nada Hodali About Her  My “Romantic Aunt.” Whoever gave her this nickname remains a mystery; it could have been one of the men that passed through her life, one of her best friends, or perhaps she herself chose the nickname, which she used to sign a paper that she left for me in an old box that once belonged to my grandmother. Over the years, there were many changes t ..read more

This list may not be complete; if you have something to add, please put it in the comments or email us at info@arablit.org. The Screams of War: Selected Poems, by Akram Alkatreb, tr. Jonas Elbousty (Seagull Books) From the publisher: ‘Those who believe in the currency of patience / Were burned out in the alleyway.’ The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb’s verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere ‘murmurs engraved on stones’, long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At t ..read more

By Olivia Snaije Iraqi academic Hanan Jasim-Khammas was just 19 in 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse came to light. Later, as a student of comparative literature, she became fascinated by body and gender studies, which led her back to 2004, to examining the terrible and powerful representation of bodies in the Abu Ghraib scandal. “I couldn’t articulate how I felt about Abu Ghraib, how those images influenced me and other Iraqis. Up to this point, no one had asked the question of what the impact had been on the Iraqi psyche. What is a body, how is it formed in this society, and why this ..read more