the tanjara

launch of khalid kishtainy's collection 'arabian tales'

2012-02-10T11:38:00.006Z

message from ARK Gallery:

"Kishtainy in a new work"
launch:
6.30 PM Friday 10 February
West London Trades Union Club,
33/35 High Street. Acton, London W3 6ND

Khalid Kishtainy is a writer known for his variety, a
variety of talents, interests and styles. All this is
reflected in his new collection of short stories, Arabian Tales: Baghdad on Thames
dealing with various subjects in a variety of styles.
‘Baghdad on Thames’ reflects the moods and
thoughts of an Iraqi humorist as he moves
between Baghdad and London. In this evening, he
will talk about all that and listen to what you,
readers, will have to say.

ت قُيع كتاب:
القشطيني في عمل جديد
خالذ القشطيىي كاتة معش فَ
تالتعذدية، تعذد الم اُ ةٌ تعذد
الا تٌمامات تعذد لأسالية. اٌ
يخشج إلى قشائ تى عُ جذيذ،
مجم عُة قصص قصيشة
تالإوجليزية تحمل س حَ زٌا التعذد
في م اُضيع اٍ مياديى اٍ
سَ حَيت اٍ. "تغذاد على التايمس "
تكشف عه وفسية كاتة عشاقي
ساخش يىتقل تحيات أفكاسي تيه
تغذاد لىذن. سيتحذث عه كل
رلك في زٌي الأمسية يستمع لما
سيق لُ وُ قشاؤي

adonis and omar qattan discuss islam, sufism & arabic literature

2012-02-08T19:20:00.004Z

A snatch of video from last night's delightful conversation between Adonis and Omar Qattan on 'Islam, Sufism & Arabic Literature', part of the 'A Tribute to Adonis' programme running at the Mosaic Rooms in London from 3 February to 30 March. The programme includes an exhibition of Adonis's art works in the venue's ground floor and basement spaces. The conversation started with discussion of Adonis's controversial PhD thesis of 40 years ago, Athabet wal Mutahawwil - The Permanent and the Evolving - which includes a historical anthology of Arabic poetry. Another key work to feature during the event was of course Adonis's Sufism and Surrealism .

Adonis

Omar Qattan

khaled mattawa receives saif ghobash-banipal prize for translation of 'adonis: selected poems'

2012-02-06T22:41:00.009Z

Khaled Mattawa signs a copy of Adonis: Selected Poems after being awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize

The editor of the Times Literary Supplement Sir Peter Stothard this evening awarded the £3,000 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation to the Libyan poet, translator and scholar Khaled Mattawa for his translation of Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press). The award was made at the annual presentation of translation prizes administered by the Society of Authors held at Kings Place in central London. The ceremony was hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Arts Council England and the Society of Authors. During the ceremony, which included readings from the winning translations, Sir Peter Stothard was joined on stage by prize administrator Paula Johnson of the Society of Authors.

Mattawa was the first winner to be announced during the awards ceremony, which saw prizes awarded for translation from five langauges. Sir Peter said Mattawa had travelled from Michigan, where he teaches at the University of Michigan, to be at the ceremony but Mattawa said he had in fact travelled from Tripoli where it was snowing like it was in London, and where there were similar problems in coping with the snowfall. Mattawa paid tribute to the Banipal Trust and Banipal magazine "for support over the years, for friendship and for their spiritual companionship". He said he was grateful to Adonis "who was a great source of inspiration." He read from the poem Body, from Adonis's book, Singular in a Plural Form (1975) which is included in Adonis: Selected Poems.

Sir Peter awarded the runner-up prize to Barbara Romaine for her translation of Spectres (Arabic Books) by Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour. Before translating Spectres, Romaine - who teaches Arabic at the University of Villanova in Pennsylvania - had translated Bahaa Taher’s novel Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, and Radwa Ashour’s Siraaj. She is currently working on another of Ashour’s novels, Farag (first published in Arabic by Dar El Shorouk in 2008), forthcoming from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP)
.Maia Tabet of Lebanon was commended for her translation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury's novel White Masks (Archipelago Books).

The Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash and the Ghobash family, and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. The judges, who met last December under the chairmanship of Paula Johnson, were novelist, columnist and critic Joan Smith, writer, translator and Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia Sarah Churchwell, translator and lecturer in Arabic Literature and Media at the University of Exeter Christina Phillips, and author and editor of Banipal magazine Samuel Shimon who is also a trustee of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

Screen showing sponsors of the translation prizes

The other four prizes awarded during the ceremony were the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from the French, the Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation from the German, the Premio Valle Inclán for translation from the Spanish and the Vondel Prize for translation from the Dutch or Flemish. One of the two runners-up for the Scott Moncrieff Prize was Frank Wynne for his translation of An Unfinished Business (Bloomsbury) by Algerian Boualam Sansal which won several prizes when first published in French in 2008 under the title Le village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller. As well as being joint runner-up for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, Wynne won the Premio Valle Inclán for his translation from Spanish of Kamchatka by Argentinian novelist Marcelo Figueras.

The Schlegel-Tieck prize was won by Damion Searls for his translation of Comedy in a Minor Key, a story of concealment and courage during the Nazi era written by a German Jewish psychiatrist Hans Keilson whose parents died in Auschwitz. Keilson, who died last June at the age of 101, took refuge with a family in the Netherlands. His novel is based on that experience. Comedy in a Minor Key is published by Hesperus whose managing director Karl Sabbagh, the well-known Palestinian-British author, journalist and TV producer, attended the awards ceremony.

After the awarding of the prizes the renowned multiple prizewinning poet, playwright and critic Sean O'Brien delivered the Sebald lecture given annually on an aspect of literature in translation. Originally known as the St Jerome lecture the lecture was renamed in honour of the founder of British Centre for Literary Translation, the late writer W G Sebald who was killed in a car crash in Norfolk in December 2001. The recent 10th anniversary of Sebald's death lent a special poignancy to this year's lecture. O'Brien had originally entitled his lecture Making the Crossing: The Poet as Translator, but he decided to change it to Making the Crossing: A poet as Translator. His wide-ranging lecture, at one profound and amusing, was based on his experiences of translating poetry and plays and took in references from Baudelaire to Bo Diddley by way of Dante and Aristophanes. He has also jointly with Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation translated the poetry of Cape Verdian writer Corsino Fortes who writes in Portuguese. These translations came about as an initiative of the London-based Poetry Translation Centre.
Susannah Tarbush

bbc apologises for quiz answer saying ariel is a 'city in israel'

2012-02-04T08:29:00.009Z

UPDATE: Abe Hayeem has now recomplained to the BBC, as he explains in this message of this afternoon, 4 Feb 2012:

Some of you felt that the BBC was not doing enough to remedy the error. Here
is the text of my re-complaint!
Abe
-------------------

I would like to thank the Complaints staff and Exec Producer Gilly Hall for their prompt response and for their apology and other moves not to broadcast this programme on iPlayer, and registering it on the audience log etc.. I don't wish to sound carping, but since this was a factual error that has gone out to a wide audience, they will be left with the assumption that Ariel is a city in Israel which snugly fits in with the Israeli agenda. I do feel that more should be done in the public realm to correct this bloomer, since Only Connect is very strict on accuracy, as Victoria Coren always emphasises. This can surely be done, as is usual with her witty and off-beat manner and banter in the next programme whether recorded or not. It is the least and not too earth- shattering thing that the BBC can do do maintain its international reputation for fairness and balance. Saying such a thing publicly will only be stating the truth -and surely the BBC can withstand the possibility of a stream of phone calls from the Israeli Embassy and its supporters! To quote an example of decisive action taken, on, yes Ariel again, was when Ariel College architecture students were short-listed in a world competition, as representatives of Israel. Letters written to the Spanish Housing Ministry, pointing out that Ariel was an illegal settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, prompted it to remove the Ariel students from the short list. It would be great to see the BBC take decisive action!

This was the message issued last night by Abe Hayeem, the architect and tireless activist for Palestine who founded Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine

I received this reply today from the BBC over the complaint that Ariel was said to be an Israeli city in a quiz line on the Connecting Wall programme.
Abe
---------------------------------------------
Complaint Response CAS-1275414-F5VG12

Dear Mr Hayeem

Thank you for contacting us regarding ‘Only Connect', broadcast on 30 January on BBC Four. We understand you had concerns in relation to the accuracy of a question asked during the programme.We forwarded your correspondence to the Executive Producer, Gilly Hall, who responded as follows:“On a recent edition of 'Only Connect' on BBC Four, broadcast 30th January 2012 a question about cities in Israel displayed an incorrect answer. The BBC would like to apologise for this oversight. Once we became aware the online wall was taken down and the programme was removed from BBC iPlayer. We have also taken steps to ensure this version will not be repeated.”Finally, we're guided by our audience feedback, so we’d like to assure you that your complaint has been registered on our audience log. This is an internal report of audience feedback that we compile on a daily basis and it’s made available to programme commissioners, channel executives and senior management. The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content. Thanks once again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

BBC Complaints

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

---------------------------------------

Anyone watching last night's popular BBC4 quiz programme, ONLY CONNECT with Victoria Coren may have noticed this. This was my complaint to the BBC.
Abe
-------------------------------

In the first round of the Connecting Wall, which was solved by the team, there were four names in the last line: Acre, Ariel, Holon and Eilat. The answer given was that they were all in Israel. Yes, said Victoria Coren emphatically,"These are cities in Israel"!

This is a shocking display of ignorance and misrepresentation to the viewer by the usually erudite Coren (and the BBC quizmasters) - especially controversial, since the BBC is usually flooded with complaints about its sometimes biased and inaccurate reporting on the Israel/Palestine issue. Ariel is actually, not a city, but an illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the BBC should have known better. It's surprising that the highly knowledgeable participants did not comment on or spot this mistake.

It may sound trivial to raise this complaint about a quiz programme, but a popular one like Only Connect that prides itself on its accuracy, will be presenting misleading information to its viewers at a time when the whole sensitive issue of illegal settlement expansion is in the news.

When the 4 names were lined up, my wife and I watched aghast, knowing what was coming next, and it surely did! We think that a correction and apology should be made at the next Only Connect programme, which Victoria Coren can easily include in her witty banter before the quizzing starts.

khalid kishtainy's saucy tales of iraq and 'baghdad-on-thames'

2012-01-30T17:20:00.005Z

The Iraqi satirist, journalist and artist Khalid Kishtainy – for many years a luminary on the Arab-British cultural scene – has long delighted readers and friends with his irreverent, often spicy, stories and columns. Now Quartet Books of London has published a collection of his stories under the title Arabian Tales: Baghdad on Thames. The 19 tales are by turns comic and tragic, and are often ribald with a devil-may-care quality. The stories’ explicit nature may not be to the taste of every reader, but they are generally entertaining.

The book’s cover illustration is by the renowned Iraqi artist Faisel Laibi Sahi who is, like Kishtainy, a member of the sizeable community of Iraqi creatives in the UK. The text of the book includes a further five illustrations by Laibi; there are also several drawings by Kishtainy whose academic training embraces both art and law.

Kishtainy was born in Baghdad and graduated from Baghdad University’s Faculty of Law and the Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to England after the 1958 revolution and has lived there ever since. He worked first at the BBC and then as a freelance writer, journalist and translator. For the past 18 years he has been a widely-read columnist on the pan-Arab daily newspaper Ash-Sharq al-Awsat.

Kishtainy is the author of a number of books in Arabic and English, fiction and non-fiction. The New Statesman and the Middle East (Palestine essays) was published in 1972 by the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. Quartet published Arab Political Humour in 1986: the late Professor Fred Halliday was a particular fan of the book, and often recommended it.

In 1997 Kegan Paul International published Kishtainy’s bawdy fictional memoir Tales from Old Baghdad: Grandmother and I. In September 2003, Elliott and Thompson published Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Getting By in Baghdad, a picaresque novel set in Saddam’s Iraq.

In 2008 By the Rivers of Babylon was published by Quartet. One of the main characters in the novel is an Iraqi Jewish gynaecologist who ends up in Israel. A Muslim man he knows from Baghad also finds himself in Israel, as a prisoner of war.

Kishtainy has warm memories of the days when Baghdad was a city where “Muslims of all sects, Christians of all denominations, Jews, Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians lived together in perfect harmony.” In one story in Arabian Tales, entitled Through a Hole: A Muslim-Christian Dialogue a Shia family and their Christian next-door-neighbours are on such good terms that they make a hole in the wall between them to pass dishes of food to each other. They resort to a similar method to protect a child from the Shia family from the British-imposed smallpox vaccination that his mother is convinced may kill him. The child is named Musa “to ensure the blessings and strong protection of the champion saviour of the Jews.”

Kishtainy is a born storyteller and his well-crafted stories with an economy of style show a keen eye for the absurdities of life. He has an instinctive sympathy for the unlucky and the underdog and frequently mocks authority figures and their pomposity. In the story A Handful of Rubbish, an Iraqi émigré professor travelling back to Iraq for a conference on Arab Solidarity is asked by an Iraqi friend to bring back for him “a clean and pure piece of Mesopotamian soil from our homeland.” The professor’s quest for this handful of earth arouses the suspicion of peasants, and the derision of officials at Baghdad airport.

There is poignancy in The Orange and the Ball, the story of the young son of an impoverished war widow. The boy has an unusual talent for football despite his mother being unable to afford a rubber ball for her children to play with. During his first match against a rival school the half-time oranges given to the team take on a special significance for the lad.

In At the Government Expense set in Baghdad in 1938 there is an emergency when the rising level of the River Tigris threatens to flood the city. The police are desperate to stave off the flood and round up women and their clients from the Kalachia red light district to work through the night digging and dumping earth to shore up Baghdad’s flood defences.

Several of the stories are set in London, Kishtainy’s 'Baghdad-on-Thames'. They include The Handkerchief, in which a delegation from the Iraqi Revolutionary Women’s Federation visits the British capital. The women have been issued with handkerchiefs embroidered with portraits of the Sole Leader, and due to a slapstick mishap on the underground one such scented handkerchief finds its way into the trousers of the British managing director of Royal Deodorants Consolidation.

There is tenderness in The Cost of Old Sins in which an elderly London man is invited to supper at the home of his aged and now lame former lover. The two reminisce about the wild exploits of their youth and joke about their physical decay.

Write a paper and F**k the World explores the opportunities for carnal escapades offered to Middle Eastern academics by international conferences. In A Woman in Metamorphosis a young Muslim diplomat posted to London, and in need of a male protector, hastily marries a callow junior clerk from the Land Registration Office who has never been abroad. While she is at work he drifts between cafes within the "Arab-land” of London stretching from Edgware Road to Queensway and Earls Court. “There, he met many of his compatriots in a likewise life of idleness: refugees, asylum seekers, failed students, drug dealers and high-class pimps. They sat and discussed ad infinitum their two branches of knowledge – sex and politics.” He has weekly assignations with a Danish "practitioner" in Soho but his wife is able to turn the situation to her advantage and to embark on discoveries of her own.
Susannah Tarbush

Arabian Tales is launched at 6.30 pm on 10 February at the West London Trades Union Club, 33-35 High Street, Acton London W3 6ND. The event is organised by ARK, the community arts space founded in 1998 by Iraqi artist Yousif Naser and the late Iraqi sculptor Dalal Al-Mufti.

ipaf administrator fleur montanaro interviewed on nile international TV

2012-01-18T15:36:00.007Z

This video shows Fleur Montanaro, Administrator of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, often known as the Arabic Booker Prize) being interviewed about the prize on Nile International TV's Breakfast Show. Montanaro was in Cairo for the 11 January announcement of the six novels shortlisted for IPAF 2012.

The six titles in contention are:

The Vagrant by Jabbour Douaihy
(Lebanon, Dar an-Nahar)

Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by Ezzedine Choukri Fishere
(Egypt, Dar al-Ain)

The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber
(Lebanon, al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi)

The Unemployed by Nasser Iraq
(Egypt, al-Dar al-Misriya al-Lubnaniya)
Toy of Fire by Bashir Mufti
(Algeria, al-Ikhtilaf)

The Women of al-Basatin by Habib Selmi
(Tunisia, Dar al-Adab)

The IPAF judges
As always with IPAF, the identity of the judges was revealed only at the same time the shortlist was announced. Chair of the judges is Syrian writer and critic Georges Tarabichi; his fellow judges are Lebanese journalist and literary critic, Maudie Bitar; Egyptian academic and women's rights activist Professor Hoda Elsadda; Qatari writer and academic Dr Huda al-Naimi and Spanish academic, translator and researcher Dr Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla.

THE 2012 SHORTLIST

The Vagrant provides a realistic, engaging portrayal of the Lebanese civil war through the eyes of a young man who finds himself uprooted by the conflict. The hero represents the crisis of the Lebanese individual imposed upon by a sectarian reality. We follow his struggle to belong as he faces unfamiliar situations and conflicts in a society that considers him an outsider.
Jabbour Douaihy was born in Zgharta, northern Lebanon, in 1949. He holds a PhD degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne and works as Professor of French Literature at the University of Lebanon. To date, he has published seven works of fiction, including novels, short stories and children’s books. His novel June Rain was shortlisted for the inaugural IPAF in 2008, and will be published in English by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in October 2012.

Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge is a novel about alienation in its various forms and senses: the hero who doesn’t belong; his second wife, torn between professional ambition and a desperation to give her husband the impression she belongs in his world; his son, with whom he has limited communication; his granddaughter, uncertain where she belongs, and his Egyptian friend, who discovers that neither his children nor his Cuban-American-Lebanese wife belong to his world. All these characters are linked by their relationship with the protagonist, who draws them together by inviting them to his granddaughter’s birthday party, at which he intends to convey some sad news.
Ezzedine Choukri Fishere is an Egyptian writer and diplomat. Born in Kuwait in 1966, he grew up in Egypt, where he graduated from Cairo University in 1987 with a BA in Political Science. After graduating, he attended a number of universities in France and Canada and attained an International Diploma in Administration from The National School of Administration, Paris (1990-92). He went on to gain a Masters in International Relations from Ottawa University (1992-95) and a doctorate in Political Science from Montreal University (1993-98). He currently teaches political science at the American University in Cairo, but also lectures at a number of other universities. In addition, he writes political articles for several Arabic, English and French periodicals and newspapers.

The Druze of Belgrade After the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon, a number of fighters from the religious Druze community are forced into exile, travelling by sea to the fortress of Belgrade on the boundary of the Ottoman Empire. In exchange for the freedom of a fellow fighter, they take with them a Christian man from Beirut called Hana Yaaqub; an unfortunate egg seller who happens to be sitting at the port. The Druze of Belgrade follows their adventures in the Balkans, as they struggle to stay alive.
Rabee Jaber, a Lebanese novelist and journalist, was born in Beirut in 1972. He has been editor of Afaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat newspaper, since 2001. His first novel, Master of Darkness, won the Critics’ Choice Prize in 1992. He has since written 16 novels, including: Black Tea; The Last House; Yousif Al-Inglizi; The Journey of the Granadan (published in German in 2005), Berytus: A City Beneath the Earth (published in French by Gallimard in 2009) and America, which was shortlisted for IPAF in 2010.

The Unemployed tells the story of a young, educated Egyptian man from a middle-class family who, like so many others, is forced to look for work in Dubai due to the lack of opportunity in Cairo. In Dubai, he discovers an astonishing world filled with people of all nationalities and he experiences mixed treatment from his friends, relations and acquaintances. And then, just as he falls in love with an Egyptian girl, he finds himself imprisoned for the murder of a Russian prostitute…
Nasser Iraq graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo University, in 1984. He has worked in cultural journalism in Egypt and co-founded the Dubai Al-Thaqafiya magazine where he has been managing editor since 2004. He has published a number of books, including: A History of Journalistic Art in Egypt (2002), which won the Ahmad Bahaa al-Din Prize in its first year; Times of the Dust (2006); From the Excess of Love (2008); The Green and the Damaged (2009) and The Unemployed (2011). He currently works as Cultural and Media Co-ordinator for the Foundation of Culture and Science Symposium in Dubai.

Toy of Fire is the story of a meeting between the novelist, Bashir Mufti, and a mysterious character called Rada Shawish, who presents Mufti with a manuscript containing his autobiography. Shawish’s goal in life has always been not to turn out like his father, who ran an underground cell in the seventies and committed suicide in the eighties. However, circumstances have driven him to follow in his father’s footsteps, resulting in him becoming a leading member of a secret group of his own.
Bashir Mufti is a writer and journalist, born in 1969 in Algiers, Algeria. He has published a number of short story collections and novels, including: Archipelago of Flies (2000); Witness of the Darkness (2002); Perfumes of the Mirage (2005); Trees of the Resurrection (2007) and Maps of Nightly Passion (2009). Some of his works have been translated into French. He often writes articles in the Arabic press and works in Algerian television as assistant producer of the cultural programme Maqamat.

The Women of Al-Basatin is an intimate portrayal of the daily lives of a modest family living in the Al-Basatin district of Tunis in Tunisia. Through the stories of this small matriarchal environment, we observe the contradictions of the wider Tunisian society, exposing a world in flux between burdensome religious traditions and a troubled modernity.
Habib Selmi was born in al-’Ala, Tunisia, in 1951. He has published four novels and two collections of short stories. A number of his stories have been translated into English, Norwegian, Hebrew and French. His first novel, Jabal al-’Anz (Goat Mountain), was published in French in 1999. His novel Ushaq Bayya (Bayya's Lovers) was published in French in 2003 and excerpted in Banipal 18. Other novels include Surat Badawi Mayyit (Picture of a Dead Bedouin, 1990); Matahat al-Raml (Sand Labyrinth, 1994); Hufar Dafi’a (Warm Pits, 1999); Ushashaqq Baya (Bayya’s Lovers, 2001) and Asrar ‘Abdallah (Abdallah’s Secrets, 2004). Selmi has lived in Paris since 1985. His novel The Scents of Marie-Claire was shortlisted for IPAF in 2009. An English translation of the book was published by Arabia Books this year.

saqi books launches the westbourne press imprint

2012-01-16T15:35:00.008Z

Lynn Gaspard, publisher

The pioneering publisher Saqi Books is entering a new phase with the launch of a new, non-fiction trade imprint, The Westbourne Press. The announcement of the launch came from publisher Lynn Gaspard, whose father André Gaspard cofounded Saqi - initially as a bookshop - in Westbourne Grove, West London, at the end of the 1970s.

Saqi established its publishing business in 1983, and in 1990 founded the sister Dar al-Saqi publishing house in Beirut. The Telegram imprint was set up in 2005 to publish new international fiction. Lynn Gaspard has been publisher of Saqi Books and Telegram since André moved to Beirut in 2009; she is now also publisher of The Westbourne Press.

Lynn says she is “absolutely thrilled” by the launch of the imprint. “The Westbourne Press is a list I wanted to establish as a by-word for topical and engaging writing. Our titles will challenge our worldview and spark debate, whether it is about gender politics, women in the Arab world, or race and class relations in the UK.”

Lynn notes that when André Gaspard and the late Mai Ghoussoub, émigrés from Lebanon, first set up Saqi Books “there weren’t many others publishing Arab fiction and non-fiction. I want to replicate their success now by launching a non-fiction list that is equally daring and exciting.”

The Westbourne Press will publish four to eight quality general trade books a year, ranging from current affairs and sexual politics to memoir and history. Its debut title, due to be published in June, is Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by American writer, lawyer and journalist Eric Berkowitz.

The book examines the attempts of the authorities, from the time of the Sumerians, through the Victorians and onwards, to control and regulate what Plato referred to as the “raging frenzy” of the sex drive. “At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly,” notes the preview of the book. “Jump forward or backward a century or two – and often far less than that – and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another.”

The book has a cast of characters “as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes, London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged – and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it.” Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, says: "Sex and Punishment is built on solid scholarship and spiced with plenty of sordid detail that will make you the hit of any cocktail party."

The Westbourne Press’s second 2012 title will be Superman is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men and Other Disastrous Inventions by the Lebanese poet, journalist and translator. Joumana Haddad. Haddad’s earlier book I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman was published by Saqi in 2010 and aroused much interest and comment.

The new imprint’s 2013 titles will include The Public Woman by prominent British feminist, journalist, novelist and human rights activist Joan Smith.

Lynn says Westbourne is open to submissions by authors, and that “we accept unsolicited manuscripts.” Following the signing of its first three titles, The Westbourne Press is talking other prospective authors. While the initial three titles are topical, political books, “we are open to all subjects, from the serious and urgent, to the lighthearted, entertaining and quirky, as long as the book is well-written for a general audience, and is engaging.”

The new imprint is open to signing up books from any language. “Our sister company in Beirut might be interested in translating and publishing a few of our titles. Joumana Haddad is also one of their authors for instance.”
Susannah Tarbush

the iconic Saqi bookshop in Westbourne Grove

Khaled Mattawa wins 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize

2012-01-16T13:54:00.006Z

Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa wins 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

It was announced today that the 2011 Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, in its sixth year, is awarded to Libyan-born Khaled Mattawa for his translation of Adonis: Selected Poems, published by Yale University Press. The judges were unanimous in voting Khaled Mattawa’s translation the winner of the £3,000 annual prize, and agreed easily on the runner-up and the commended translation. The prize will be awarded at the The Translation Prizes Award Ceremony in London on 6 February (see below). The event includes readings by the prizewinners.

Adonis

Barbara Romaine is runner-up for her translation of Spectres by Radwa Ashour, published by Arabia Books in the UK and by Interlink Books in the USA. Commended is Beirut-born Maia Tabet for her translation of White Masks by Elias Khoury, published by Archipelago Books, USA.

The four judges, who met last December under the chairmanship of prize administrator Paula Johnson of the Society of Authors, are novelist, columnist and critic Joan Smith, writer, translator and Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia Sarah Churchwell, translator and lecturer in Arabic Literature and Media at the University of Exeter Christina Phillips, and author and editor of Banipal magazine Samuel Shimon who is also a trustee of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. Their decisions are announced below.

Judges’ Announcement
THE WINNER
Khaled Mattawa for his translation of Adonis: Selected Poems
Khaled Mattawa’s translation of this selection of Adonis’s poetry is destined to become a classic. It is a monumental piece of work, a long-overdue compendium of works by one of the most important poets of our time, a contribution to world literature that demonstrates the lyricism and full range of Adonis’s poetry. The translations are supple and fluent, flexible yet accurate, consistently sensitive to the poet’s nuances, and beautifully render into English Adonis’s modernist sensibilities. Anglophone readers will gain a new appreciation of why Adonis has so often been likened to TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, with the freshness of his lines and imagination liberated from the self-conscious archaism of other translations, and allowing his unique reworking of the legends of East and West, the arcs of love and death, to spring forth. This book should ensure that Western readers recognize the significance of Adonis’s contribution to world poetry.

Adonis is internationally known as a poet, theoretician of poetics and thinker, a patriarch of modern Arabic literature whose poetry resonates with universal dimensions. Known for his biting criticism of the dominating influence of Islamic ideology on modern Arabic literature, his influential, daring and experimental works of poetry enjoin the present with the past while giving perspectives into the future. Adonis’s poems in their original Arabic are not easy, in fact they are difficult and complex. They are multi-layered with history, myths and ideas, rooted in metaphors, symbols and surrealist images, and wide-ranging in genre and styles – all woven within a fine and concise language.
It was an immense challenge that faced the talented poet-translator Khaled Mattawa in translating Adonis’s poems to English or, as is often said in the Arab world, to the “language of Shakespeare”, and he has succeeded most eminently. Adonis: Selected Poems is a substantial and comprehensive volume covering over half a century of Adonis’s works from 1957 to 2008. Khaled Mattawa has brought Adonis’s poems to the English language with a musicality and aesthetic sensitivity that echo their innovative, conceptual and stylistic complexities – and in doing so he has created an original, powerful and lyrical poetic work in English. In a word: stunning.
• On learning the news director of Yale University Press John Donatich commented: “It is very gratifying to see Adonis and his wonderful translator Khaled Mattawa receive this prestigious award. I know from personal experience how many readers have been so moved by these Selected Poems; it is so important that other people discover the work.”

RUNNER-UP
Barbara Romaine for her translation of Spectres by Radwa Ashour

Radwa Ashour’s Spectres is an ambitious and moving blend of autobiography, history, politics and fiction telling the story of Egypt since the 1950s through the experiences of two women who are each other’s ghostly doubles. This experimental novel, which is political in the best sense, needs a confident translator, and has found one in Barbara Romaine. Her impressive translation renders the metaphorical power of Ashour’s story with grace and subtlety, skillfully reflecting the shifts in time and the different voices and registers. Fluent and refreshing, Romaine has done a brilliant job.

COMMENDED
Maia Tabet for her translation of White Masks by Elias Khoury

First published in Arabic in 1981, White Masks was one of the first novels that dared to address the civil war in Lebanon, the terrible atrocities, and the war’s reflection in the daily lives of the people. Bringing home the dreadful reality of civil war, it is a fascinating investigation into investigation itself, telling the story of the murder of one man during the Lebanese Civil War, and showing the chaos and incoherence of history as it emerges, and the importance of personal stories to counteract and contain the messiness of history. Elias Khoury’s language is smooth and poetic, and finds its parallel in the masterful translation of Maia Tabet which brings the immediacy of the story to life, without sacrificing the nuances of Khoury’s moral and philosophical questions, transposing the colour and originality of the Arabic into wonderfully lucid prose.

• Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya in 1964 and emigrated to the USA in his teens. He has translated eight volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, Adonis: Selected Poems (2010), shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize; Shepherd of Solitude by Amjad Nasser (2009); These Are Not Oranges, My Love by Iman Mersal (2008); A Red Cherry on A White-Tiled Floor by Maram Al-Massri (2004, 2007); Miracle Maker (2003) and In Every Well A Joseph Is Weeping (1997) by Fadhil al-Azzawi; Without An Alphabet Without A Face by Saadi Youssef (2002), winner of the 2003 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; Questions and Their Retinue by Hatif Janabi (1996).

He is the author of four books of poetry, Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010), Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press,1996).

In 2010 he was selected as recipient of the 2010 Academy Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets. He teaches creative writing in the English faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and served as President of RAWI, (Radius of Arab American Authors) 2005-2010. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA translation grant, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes and is a founding contributing editor of Banipal.

• Adonis was born Ali Ahmad Said in Al-Qassabin, Syria, in 1930, and adopted the name Adonis when he was 17. He co-founded Sh’ir poetry magazine and later formed Muwaqaf, working to liberate Arabic poetry from its old forms and pioneering the prose poem. He is author of over 20 collections of poetry. An internationally renowned poet, essayist, and theoretician of Arabic poetics, he is regarded as “the grand old man of poetry, secularism and free speech in the Arab world" who champions democracy and secular thought in the Middle East, and the separation of state and religion. He is the recipient of many international awards and is an elected member of the Stéphane Mallarmé Academy in France. In May 2011 he became the first Arab laureate of Germany’s premier literary prize, the Goethe Prize.

• Barbara Romaine has been teaching the Arabic language for about twenty years. She has translated the novels Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa Taher (University of California Press, 1996) and Siraaj by Radwa Ashour (University of Texas Press, 2007). Her translation of Spectres was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2007. She is currently at work on another of Ashour’s novels, Farag (Dar El Shorouk, 2008) which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.

• Maia Tabet was born and raised in Beirut. She has worked as a journalist, editor and freelance translator. Her first full-length book translation was Little Mountain by Elias Khoury. She has lived and travelled throughout the Middle East and South Asia, and is currently based in Baltimore, USA. White Masks is her most recent book translation. Her translation of the winning novel of the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Saudi author Abdo Khal’s Tarmi bi Sharar (Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles) is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.

• The Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation is an annual prize of £3,000, awarded to the translator(s) of a published translation in English of a full-length imaginative and creative Arabic work of literary merit published in the thirty-five years prior to submission of the translation and first published in English translation in the year prior to the award. Entries are judged by a panel of four distinguished authors, critics and literary experts, two of whom read and consider both the Arabic original and the English translation.

The prize is administered by the Society of Authors in the UK, as are other prizes for literary translation into English from European languages. The Award Ceremony is hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Arts Council, and the Society of Authors. The Saif Ghobash-Banipal entries can have been published anywhere in the world but must be available for purchase in the United Kingdom, either via a distributor or on-line.

The prize, the first worldwide for a published work of English literary translation from Arabic, was established in 2005 by Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation, and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, and is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash and his family in memory of his father, the late Saif Ghobash, a man passionate about Arabic literature and other literatures of the world.

The Award Ceremony

Monday 6 February
7pm, King’s Place

90 York Way, London N1 9AG

The Translation Prizes Award Ceremony
with Readings by the prizewinners

Prizes presented by Sir Peter Stothard

and the Sebald Lecture on the Art of Literary Translation

given by Sean O’Brien on

“Making The Crossing: the Poet as Translator”

bloomsbury launches selma dabbagh's palestine novel 'out of it' in london

2011-12-11T13:26:00.029Z

British-Palestinian fiction writer Selma Dabbagh’s debut novel Out of It, newly published in the UK by Bloomsbury Publishing, was launched at the Mosaic Rooms in central London last Thursday with a discussion between Dabbagh and the distinguished British novelist Maggie Gee, followed by a book signing.

Out of It is an inter-generational Palestinian novel set in Gaza, England and the Gulf. The novel’s main characters are 27-year-old twins Rashid and Iman, their parents, and their older brother Sabri. Confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs in an explosion that killed wife and son, Sabri is writing a book on Palestinian history.

As the novel opens Gaza is under bombardment. Unemployed Rashid, who has been awake through the night smoking marijuana and watching the onslaught, is offered an escape route in the form of a scholarship to London. His twin Iman, a teacher who is uncomfortably aware she is seen as a Swiss-educated outsider and returnee, is trying with difficulty to find a role as an activist. On her way home from a night-long women’s committee meeting she finds she is being watched by an armed fighter in a green jacket. The plot of Out of It includes family secrets, love stories, factionalism, and betrayals.

Following its UK publication, the novel (published as a trade format paperback) is set to make an international splash, with Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) publishing it in on 19 December for sale in the Middle East and worldwide. Publication in the USA by Bloomsbury USA is scheduled for June 2012. (BQFP has world rights in all languages, and has licensed rights to Bloomsbury London to sell their edition in the UK: the US office is distributing the Bloomsbury UK edition in North America).

BQFP will publish an Arabic translation in December 2012. The translator is the poet and novelist Samer Abu Hawwash, born in Lebanon in 1972 to a Palestinian refugee family. Abu Hawwash is one of the ‘Beirut 39’ authors – the 39 Arab authors aged less than 40 selected by a panel of judges in 2009 for the superior quality of their work.

Although Out of It is Dabbagh’s first published novel, the London-based author has won acclaim for her Palestine-oriented short stories in the past few years. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies, including those published by Granta and International PEN, and have been nominated for several prizes including the International PEN David TK Wong Award and the Pushcart Prize.

At the London launch Maggie Gee said she had first come across Dabbagh’s writing five years ago when she was co-editing an anthology for the British Council. The anthology NW15: The Anthology of New Writing, vol 15 (Granta, 2007) was co-edited by Gee and Bernadine Evaristo.

“There were commissioned pieces and around 800 unsolicited pieces,” Gee recalled. “Two short stories by Selma Dabbagh – this writer whose name we didn’t know at all – floated straight to the top of the pile. We were very torn over which one to include.” She and Evaristo finally chose the story "Down the Market". “It was one of the pieces of writing we were proudest of having in the anthology,” Gee says.

Selma Dabbagh reads from her novel

The Guardian newspaper’s reviewer of the anthology Caroline McGinn was enthusiastic about the story. She wrote: “The first-timers range further afield, with wildly varying degrees of accomplishment. Among the best in prose are Selma Dabbagh, who makes nail-biting narrative out of the plight of the Palestinians...”

Another of Dabbagh’s stories, “Me (the Bitch) and Bustanji”, was well-received when it appeared in Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women edited by Jo Glanville (Telegram Books 2006). Suzanne Joinson described the story in Al Ahram Weekly as “entertaining and moving”.

Out of It carries on its cover praise from the British-Egyptian fiction writer and essayist Ahdaf Soueif, founder of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). Soueif writes: “An original and vivid voice. Full of energy, this is a new and welcome take on the Palestinian story.’ Soueif also chose it as one of her books of the year in the Guardian Review.

Edited excerpts from the discussion between Maggie Gee and Selma Dabbagh:

Maggie Gee: Your first novel, Out of It, is just coming out. It’s being published here and in the United States and in Arabic translation, I believe you have interviews lined up in the press, and Ahdaf Soueif has chosen it as her book of the year ... so I’m wondering how you’re feeling.

Selma Dabbagh: I’m feeling great – a bit nervous, but it’s very gratifying to have a physical object and get it published - a physical object which manifests a dream in a way, something I’ve been working on for a very long time.

Maggie Gee: I think the heart of this book – like the heart, in a way, of most great novels – is a family. And it’s a divided family – divided between generations, divided between the children, and also geographically divided. It’s an archetypal modern familyn if you liken and it’s a Palestinian family – but at heart it is just family, this great subject for novels. And you make us understand them all, even if we don’t always like them. Was that your aim?

Selma Dabbagh: Yes, definitely. I mean I don’t think I’ve got any perfectly nice characters: they all have aspects to them which are awkward, and particularly with each other, so there’s quite a lot of fractiousness. But in the broader Palestinian context I was quite keen to have a family which showed between the generations different eras of struggle. So each generation represents a different phase or wave of Palestinian resistance within this one family. The main division is between the twin brother and sister – one of whom, the sister, wants to engage more politically whereas the brother just wants to opt out. But in the current political climate it seems to be very difficult either to engage meaningfully or to actually get out from the pressures of people wanting you to be politicised.

Maggie Gee: you say you poke fun at them but actually I think you inhabit them very fully as well. We see the world through their eyes and that’s one of the things I admire most of all. Iman and Rashid are 27-year-old twins and they are the educated young: maybe in some respects life is easier for them but they have the weight of the older generation, the expectations of the older generation, the things the older generation have done in that different era of struggle, always on their backs in a way. Jibril is the father and Jihan the mother, and I believe you’re going to read something to us about Jibril in exile.

Selma Dabbagh: I’ve just got one very short reading today. The father of the two main characters is actually separated from the mother and he lives in the Gulf. Part of Palestinian existence is this fragmentation over geography. He was active within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) but has left it. He’s waiting in this unidentified Gulf state for his daughter Iman to arrive from Gaza. He’s sitting in somewhere like Starbucks and he’s found out that the man behind the counter who’s got a sign [name badge] saying ‘Ernesto’ is actually a Palestinian from his village and they are from interrelated families. He’s got very excited about this – the whole thing has kind of come alive to him again, so he’s sort of meditating ... Ernesto comes from a family called the Abu Wazirs and Jibril is from a family called the Mujaheds.

[Selma reads from Chapter 24 of Out of It]

Maggie Gee: This is one of those books where the title runs through the book like a watermark; all good literary books do that. In Out of It people are always longing to be out of it, but they are always pulled back. In that passage I think it’s great the way Jibril is in this kind of globalised limbo and he’s suddenly hijacked by ... the name, the village, and suddenly he’s back again. In all your characters there’s that terrific tension – certainly in the young, they so want to get out. Rashid is desperate to get out, but when he gets out he doesn’t fit, and then he’s longing for a home which isn’t home. So it’s a book about exile and restlessness I suppose.
One of the things that is terrific about this book is that while a lot of good literary novels are by old people about old people, this is a novel about what it is to be in your twenties. And with these two 27-year-old twins I think you are deeply in touch with that feeling of frustration, and hopefulness. Could you say something about the twins and about that youthfulness?

Selma Dabbagh: I partly chose them because I wanted that energy, because I think Palestine is a subject that has got very deadened – it’s overdone in the media, it’s connected with politics, it’s connected with perennial continuing problems. It’s somewhere people don’t really want to go, it’s not very accessible. So I wanted something new and fresh and to have that energy and that frustration. Half the population of Gaza is under 16, it’s a very young population that you’re dealing with. The novel for me started with an image, which was this boy leaping on a roof, this idea of someone defying the bomber ahead of him, what did that mean.

Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee: Also it’s a touching picture of brother and sister, there’s a sort of playfulness and tenderness. You are taking on a very difficult subject, the life of young Palestinians in Gaza and in exile and the relationship to their country and their parents. I say it’s difficult – it shouldn’t be difficult, but because effectively Palestine’s a war zone and people have very strong feelings about it your book is going to be read politically and this sometimes may make for rather less nuanced readings, or maybe for stupid readings. I’m wondering if your own awareness that this would happen made the writing more difficult.

Selma Dabbagh: Incredibly difficult. I was really anxious, particularly in the beginning when I first started writing it, about getting the representation right. I don’t think that that’s something which would affect you if you are writing on other subjects, but when you feel maybe a subject matter or a people have been misrepresented, I think that the onus on you is much greater.

Maggie Gee: All I can say is I’m sure it was more difficult but it doesn’t come out in any way as deadened or PC (politically correct). I think how you do it is by plural voices, by showing lots and lots of points of view coming in and fighting. It’s a very frank book and it says a lot of unsayable things, which is great...
I think you really enjoy dialogue. I felt a little uncomfortable reading this book as a British reader because [it makes] you see yourself from the outside and you see yourself as you might be seen by people coming to this country from any Arab culture really. It’s that sense of what we sound like, what our food is like, and particularly I think there’s some fantastic dialogue. I love satire ... and there’s a particular I think supper where some middle class people are talking – it’s so recognisable and it’s wince-making. You recognise yourself in a way and it’s very funny and it’s very accurate and I think it’s great .. Did you enjoy the wit?

Selma Dabbagh: I think some of the other things I’ve written have been funnier. I had a bit of a sense of humour failure on the subject matter sometimes – it’s quite hard to sort of crack jokes in Gaza for example –but I wanted to keep it light and I’m glad that comes through.

Maggie Gee: I think it does. It’s not necessarily what people expect from a book about Palestine. I suffer from this myself: if you write books about serious subjects people just can’t quite believe you’re joking. And they’re sort of – ‘is she being funny?’ But it is a very funny book.
I want to talk about metaphor. One of the things that makes this a very good literary book, as well as a book that has got terrific pace, is that it’s full of metaphors. But they are not the kind of metaphors that I think sometimes make our school of writers quite difficult ... because sometimes there’s a sense there of an effort being made, of yet another good metaphor being invented. Whereas with Selma there’s a sense it’s all organic, that this is the way she sees the world - it’s the energy of the writing I think. There are so many examples and these are just ones I came across at random: tents that are temporary habitations are sprouting limbs and blanket corners in the morning where they don’t quite fit. There is a plump man, a sad lip of fat pouted over his belt, I love that. Charles Denham’s skin smells like “wet potato peel”. And I wanted to ask you ... do you just write? I got the feeling that’s exactly the way you experience.

Selma Dabbagh: Sometimes you mull over a particular scene for quite a while, if you want to add something to it.

Maggie Gee: And I loved it when Rashid opens his window and he hears "the blunder of lorries, clouds of birds..." It’s a beautifully written book. The last thing I want to say – there’s a lot to praise about this book – is I want to praise something that I think is very important and that I think a lot of literary novels miss out on: this novel has a very strong sense of plot and structure, pulling us on towards the end. I was reading very carefully and I got within three pages of the end and I still did not know how it was going to end. I was desperate to know and I genuinely didn’t know. This is very rare in a literary book. And when the ending comes, of course I mustn’t give it away, it works at a plot level and it’s also a perfect metaphor for what happens to – well let’s say it’s about the gap between the lucky and the unlucky and it’s a superb metaphorical ending. I think why this is an important book as well as a terrific read, because the future depends on how we negotiate the difference between the lucky and the unlucky.

Alexandra Pringle

After the discussion Alexandra Pringle, editor in chief of Bloomsbury Adult Books, gave the audience some background on Bloomsbury’s interest in Palestine-related books:
"About three or four years ago Ahdaf Soueif asked me to go on the Palestine Festival of Literature. I went with 20 or so writers through Palestine and it was the most profoundly moving, upsetting and revealing experience I would say of my life. And I will never forget a moment when one of the band of us, the writer and ex-publisher Carmen Callil – who had been my rather frightening boss many years before – turned to me and said darling, we writers, it’s hard for us to do anything but you publishers can, you have to publish. And that stayed with me so forcefully. Since then we’ve published Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate and now Selma’s really wonderful novel that I think tells you more than any work of non-fiction or journalism what the living breathing experience is of being young and alive and from Gaza. And for that we have to thank her profoundly, and hope for huge success for this book."

Pringle and Dabbagh will be in conversation at 2pm on 22 January at an event entitled Publishing a First Novel being held as part of the First Fictions launch weekend - a festival in Brighton to celebrate and champion first novels, past and present.

report by Susannah Tarbush

bbc correspondent rana jawad's 'knitting in tripoli' radio programme & cake recipes

2011-12-05T10:04:00.007Z

The journalist Rana Jawad has broadcast on BBC World Service Radio an amazing 55-minute programme Knitting in Tripoli on how she worked underground - using a male persona on air - as a BBC correspondent in Tripoli in the 7-month revolution. Her interviewees, women and men, now tell their incredible stories of their experiences during that time. They include women who smuggled bullets in their handbags and hid ammunition and weapons at home in gift boxes. The level of courage of people in Tripoli, often wrongly portrayed as a 'sleeping city' at the time, is humbling.

Rana took up knitting and cake making as a distraction during those anxious days as she told BBC Radio 4's Sunday morning programme Broadcasting House (BH) in late August, after the liberation of Tripoli. These are the recipes that the BH website carried at the time:

From BBC Broadcasting House – Radio 4 - website, 28 August 2011

RANA'S RECIPES

This week we heard from Rana Jawad, a journalist living in Tripoli. She explained how baking took her mind off events in her home country. We thought we'd share with you her own recipes.

CHILLI CHOCOLATE CAKE
For a 23cm round pan, sides and base buttered, and base lined with greaseproof paper.
3 eggs
280g sugar
50ml of strong coffee [made up of 1 tablespoon of of instant and hot water]
1 shot of milk
225 ml corn oil

With hand-held electric mixer: cream the wet ingredients starting with the eggs and sugar until nice and thick, then adding the rest.

225g flour
50 unsweetened cocao powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon of chilli powder [or cayenne]

Then sift all and add to wet in three batches until just mixed in.

DO NOT overmix: bake at 180 celcius for about 50 mins or less or more, insert toothpick to check if it's done only after the cake has risen [30 mins onwards].

RANA'S ROSE WATER AND APRICOT CAKE
For an 18 cm round pan sides and base buttered, and base lined with greaseproof paper.

125 g flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of ground cloves

1 egg
125g sugar
75 ml corn oil
25ml Rose Water [found in middle eastern stores]
50ml milk 1tsp vanilla extract or essence
6 dried apricots, finely diced
handful of black currants

Same instructions as above, cream the wet, add in the dry. Bake for 30 mins at 180 celcius.

TUMERIC AND FENNEL CAKE ["Inspired by an ethnic treat from my home country, Lebanon"]

For 20cm cake tin sides and base buttered, and base lined with greaseproof paper.

2 eggs
175g sugar
160 ml corn oil
2tsp orange blossom water [found in middle eastern stores, if unavailable, just plain water]
80ml evaporated mil or normal milk

Dry ingredients:
220g flour
2 tsp ground tumeric
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fennel seeds, lightly crushed.

Instructions as previously noted and bake at 180 celcius for about 40 mins, insert toothpick in the center to check, it should come out clean.

interview with hawra al-nadawi, the only woman on the ipaf longlist

2011-11-26T14:38:00.011Z

Hawra al-Nadawi

When the 13-novel longlist of the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was published earlier this month, the fact that it included only one woman inevitably attracted considerable comment. The one woman on the longlist is Iraqi-Danish writer Hawra al-Nadawi, whose longlisted debut novel Under the Copenhagen Sky is published by Dar al-Saqi.

The publisher told the tanjara: "Saqi was enthusiastic about this first novel; we felt on reading the manuscript that Hawra’ is a very promising young author. Her selection in the long list happily confirms our assessment. This novel is strong enough to constitute an important new addition to what could be called Iraqi Diaspora literature."

The six-book shortlist for the prize, and the identity of the judges, was to have been announced in Cairo on 7 December. However, IPAF says the announcement has been postponed until 11 January 2012, given "the current turmoil in Cairo and our awareness of, and respect for, the suffering and anxieties of many of those involved." IPAF adds: "It remains our intention to make this announcement in Cairo, recognising its importance as a hub for Arabic literature." The winner is due to be announced in Abu Dhabi on 27 March - the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

Under the Copenhagen Sky tells of the love story between Huda, a teenager born in Copenhagen to Iraqi parents, and Rafid, an older man forced to emigrate to Denmark by the political situation in Iraq. The story begins when Rafid receives a letter from Huda, whom he has never met, asking him to translate her novel from Danish into Arabic. As their relationship grows, Huda begins to reveal that she knows more about Rafid than he first thought. The novel interweaves chapters from Huda’s manuscript with Rafid’s own account of the romance that develops between the pair through their email exchanges.

Al-Nadawi is not only the sole woman on the longlist, but she is also, at 27, the youngest of the 13 longlisted authors by more than 10 years. The next youngest is Syrian writer Fadi Azzam, longlisted for Sarmada, who turned 38 this year. Al-Nadawi and Azzam are among the three young authors longlisted for their debut novels; the third is Charbel Kattan (41) of Lebanon longlisted for Suitcases of Memory.

Under the Copenhagen Sky

Al-Nadawi, who now lives in London, answered the following questions for this blog:

Many congratulations on being included on the longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) which was officially announced on 10 November. How did you hear the news, and what was your reaction?
Thank you very much. I was clueless as to when the long-list was to be announced, so I was not really expecting anything when the editorial manager at Dar al-Saqi called me early in the morning of that day to inform me that my novel was longlisted. I was of course happy to know that.

How does it feel to be the only woman on the IPAF 2012 longlist? Is it significant for you or do you think gender is irrelevant in the IPAF judging process?
Last year people were thrilled because there were as many as six women in the long list: this year they're thrilled because there is only one. This debate never seems to end. I truly believe that creativity knows no gender, no age, and no race, thus I never question any of those.

Your novel has an evocative title. Please tell us something about the novel and the writing of it. Is it autobiographical in at least some aspects?
I started working on the novel from early 2005 and finished it after four years. The main reason behind the idea of writing a novel was my desire to engage myself in something that would make me write every day. It is not autobiographical as I had no idea what the novel should be about when I took the decision to write. I started looking around me and found inspiration in my community and little by little the features of the characters started to emerge. The novel is based in Copenhagen: the main characters are of Iraqi descent and the novel focuses on the cultural differences with which the characters are dealing. Growing up I had always noticed that the media mainly highlights the actions and traits of people with different ethnic background – they are violent, they are ignorant, they are annoyingly different, they don’t integrate! etc. It almost never digs into their feelings to show how they feel about being an outcast, or in simpler terms, just different. Therefore feelings in general were a main concern for me while writing the novel. I wanted to bring this matter to the fore.

When and where were you born, and why did your family migrate to Denmark?
I was born in the Iraqi capital Baghdad in August 1984. My parents were imprisoned two months after my birth along with other family members, for political reasons. My father was sentenced to 25 years and my mother to 10. They were however released in the so-called general amnesty of 1986. I was kept with my mum, spending the first two years of my life in Saddamite prisons. During the 1991 uprising against the former regime my father was jailed again. Finally, when they miraculously released him, he decided that we had to leave Iraq so we migrated to Denmark where I grew up in Copenhagen.

Was there a dilemma for you over the choice of language in which you would write fiction, and how did you manage to maintain and develop your written Arabic while growing up in Denmark?
I am bilingual from birth. Being half Kurd, half Arab, I grew up speaking Kurdish and Arabic along with Danish, and languages have always had a huge impact on me. Since I went to a Danish school, my parents decided to homeschool me in Arabic and they were very strict about it. On the other hand Danes love languages, and they are great at teaching them too. In high school I had already had classes in Latin, French, German, English and of course Danish. But it was Arabic and oriental languages that truly fascinated me the most. Arabic is a very rich and strong language and gives you more freedom when you choose to play with it, so I prefer it when writing.

Did you always want to be a writer? Is there a literary trend in your family?
My extended family include poets and writers. I have been quite acquainted with literary life since childhood, and have always been passionate about wanting to be a writer.

Could you say something about your reading of fiction and whether any authors have been particular influences on your writing?
In order to become a good writer you need to be an excellent reader first. In Copenhagen there is an Arabic section in almost all public libraries. I used to go to the local library every day and spent hours after school reading. Over half of the Arabic books at the libraries were by Egyptian writers, and I was charmed by their rich style and the oriental spirit of the Middle East which they present so beautifully. However I don’t know which writer has influenced my writing in particular; it’s pretty hard to tell.

What was the earliest fiction you wrote, and had any of your writing, fiction or non-fiction, been published before Under the Copenhagen Sky appeared?
As far as I can remember the first fiction I wrote was a short story at the age of 10, and I continued writing reviews of books plus writing about my daily routine. Besides, I used to write poetry in Danish. Before publication of my first novel I published several articles online.

What did you study at university?
I am studying linguistics at present. I wish to specialize in Arabic in the future.

Did you master the skills of fiction writing on your own, or did you for example go to creative writing classes or a writing group?
I never took any classes whatsoever. When it comes to writing, my feelings are my compass. Writing a novel taught me to be patient. It's like a long weaving process – all you need is your tools and your determination.

Banipal magazine of modern Arabic fiction has paid some attention to Arab writers in Scandinavia. For example it recently ran a special feature on Arabic writers in Sweden, and it has also published contributions from two Iraqi writers living in Denmark – poet Muniam al Faker and fiction writer Duna Ghali. Is there much of an Arab literary scene in Denmark from your experience?
I was not much involved in the literary scene when I used to live there. I know however that there are projects which aim to translate Arabic fiction into Danish and was very excited about that. Unfortunately nothing has yet been produced, so perhaps the whole translation plan is postponed.

Have the invasion of Iraq, and subsequent events there, had an effect on your writing?
The first time I went back to Iraq was August 2003. All the beautiful images that I’d had in my mind from the age of six were replaced with scenes of destruction. Still, I try my best not to let that affect my writing. There are certainly other beautiful sides of Iraq on which I would like to focus. Our multiculturalism for instance is a huge inspiration for me.

Are there plans for your novel to be translated into English? Do you have a literary agent?
My novel is based in Copenhagen; some Arab readers had no idea where Copenhagen is located on the map. Some of them had not even heard of it before the Muhammed cartoons. I think my novel gives Arab readers a new glimpse of how it is to be a young Arab living in Copenhagen. Through translation of the novel I will reach a new audience with a different background, and that’s a new goal for me.
Literary agents are an ultimate luxury for an Arab writer, of course I don’t yet have one.

How did your publishing deal with Dar al-Saqi come about?
Dar al-Saqi was the first publishing house I thought of when I decided to publish my novel, considering that they are well known and well read in the Arab World. So I managed to send them the novel which they received favourably and I have a good relationship with them.

Susannah Tarbush

ipaf issues synopses and author bios for its longlist of 13 novels

2011-11-23T18:33:00.023Z

The administrators of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, often referred to as the Arabic Booker Prize) have now issued synopses and author bios for the 13 novels on the longlist for IPAF 2012 which was announced on 10 November. The shortlist of six novels will be announced in Cairo on 7 December, and the winner in Abu Dhabi on 27 March - the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The $60,000 prize is composed of the $50,000 award plus the $10,000 that goes to each shortlisted book.

Sarmada (pub. Thaqafa)
by
Fadi Azzam (Syria)

Documentary producer Rafi Azmi meets a strange woman in Paris - a Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne - who informs him that she has lived a previous life in his village of Sarmada, in southern Syria. It turns out that she is the reincarnation of a woman murdered by her brothers in an honour killing. Affected by her story, Rafi returns to his hometown, to discover an entire world previously hidden from him. The woman’s story leads him to delve into the depths of the place and uncover its secrets, desires, beauty and the co-existence of its people of different religions.

Fadi Azzam was born in Sweida, southern Syria, in 1983. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Damascus in 1998 and has written for Arabic newspapers, as well as publishing a number of stories in Arabic magazines. He is the author of a book entitled Things Underneath (Dar Merit, 2010). He was a cultural and arts correspondent for Al Quds al-Arabi between 2007 and 2009 and currently works as a producer of documentary films and three-dimensional cartoons in Dubai. Sarmada is his first novel; an English translation by Adam Talib was recently published by Swallow Editions.

Paving the Sea (pub. Riyad al-Rayyes)
by
Rashid al-Daif (Lebanon)

The second half of the nineteenth century saw Syrians fighting to build a new Syrian state and Faris Mansour Hashem is one of the movement’s most fervent activists alongside his friend, the influential writer Georgy Zeidan. However his plans are thwarted as, whilst he is studying medicine at the newly-founded American University in Beirut, student strikes force him to emigrate to the United States. Following in the footsteps of his father and thousands of his fellow countrymen, he begins a new life in America, joining the American army and going to fight in the Spanish-American war in Cuba. It is after he marries that he decides to fulfil his dream of returning to Beirut. But the question is: can he achieve his dream?

Rashid al-Daif was born in Zgharta, northern Lebanon, in 1945. He is Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Lebanon. He has published 13 novels, three poetry collections and a short story collection about children. His works have been translated into 12 languages.

The Unemployed (pub. Al-Dar al-Masriya al-Lubnaniya)
by
Nasr Iraq (Egypt)

The Unemployed tells the story of a young, educated Egyptian man from a middle-class family who, like so many others, is forced to look for work in Dubai due to the lack of opportunity in Cairo. In Dubai, he discovers an astonishing world filled with people of all nationalities and he experiences mixed treatment from his friends, relations and acquaintances. And then, just as he falls in love with an Egyptian girl, he finds himself imprisoned for the murder of a Russian prostitute…

Nasr Abelfatah Ibrahim Iraq graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo University, in 1984. He has worked in cultural journalism in Egypt and co-founded the Dubai Al-Thaqafiya magazine where he has been managing editor since 2004. He has published a number of books, including: A History of Journalistic Art in Egypt (2002), which won the Ahmad Bahaa al-Din Prize in its first year; Times of the Dust (2006); From the Excess of Love (2008); The Green and the Damaged (2009) and The Unemployed (2011). He currently works as Cultural and Media Co-ordinator for the Foundation of Culture and Science Symposium in Dubai.

Suitcases of Memory (pub. Naufel)
by
Charbel Kattan (Lebanon)

There are ‘lost’ bags in Beirut airport. A search is made for their owners and they either come to collect them or the bags remain forgotten in the storage room. There are also ‘orphan’ bags, whose owners cannot be identified... that is, until Ehab Alem arrives in the customs department. As a child, he lost his father in mysterious circumstances at the beginning of the Lebanese war, and he has dedicated his life to searching for him. So Ehab decides to solve the riddle of the five ‘orphans’ of the airport. Inside each bag is a story, told by its contents to those who are good at listening. As the owner of each bag is found, a different story linked to a part of the Lebanese war is told. In his quest to find each owner, Ehab starts to find himself by recalling his childhood. He begins to realise the meaning of life, revives his own hopes and falls in love, in turn bringing his own story to completion.

Charbel Kattan was born in Maghdouche, southern Lebanon, in 1970. He moved to South Africa in 1990, where he continued his higher education and obtained a degree in Information Technology. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg. Suitcases of Memory is his first novel.

Toy of Fire (pub. Al-Ikhtilef)
by
Bashir Mufti (Algeria)

Toy of Fire is the story of a meeting between the novelist, Bashir Mufti, and a mysterious character called Rada Shawish, who presents Mufti with a manuscript containing his autobiography. Shawish’s goal in life has always been not to turn out like his father, who ran an underground cell in the seventies and committed suicide in the eighties. However, circumstances have driven him to follow in his father’s footsteps, resulting in him becoming a leading member of a secret group of his own.

Bashir Mufti is a writer and journalist, born in 1969 in Algiers, Algeria. He has published a number of short story collections and novels, including: Archipelago of Flies (2000); Witness of the Darkness (2002); Perfumes of the Mirage (2005); Trees of the Resurrection (2007) and Maps of Nightly Passion (2009). Some of his works have been translated into French. He often writes articles in the Arabic press and works in Algerian television as assistant producer of the cultural programme Maqamat.

Under the Copenhagen Sky (pub. Dar al-Saqi)
by
Hawra al-Nadawi (Iraq/Denmark)

Under the Copenhagen Sky tells the love story of Huda, a teenage girl born in Copenhagen to Iraqi parents, and Rafid, an older man forced to emigrate to Denmark by the political situation in Iraq. It begins when Rafid receives a letter from Huda, who he has never met before, asking him to translate her novel from Danish into Arabic. As their relationship grows, Huda begins to reveal that she knows more about him than he first thought. This novel weaves together chapters from Huda’s manuscript with Rafid’s own account of the romance that is developing between them through their email exchanges.

Hawra al-Nadawi is an Iraqi writer living in London. She was six when she and her family left Iraq for political reasons and moved to Denmark, where she grew up, learning Arabic at home. Under the Copenhagen Sky is her first novel.

Nocturnal Creatures of Sadness (pub. Dar Merit)
by
Mohamed al-Refai (Egypt)

Nocturnal Creatures of Sadness follows the life of hero Yahya. It opens with some bizarre events from his childhood, from the story of Ali ibn al-Aashara, who disappears from the town of Mahala al-Wasaaya, to the beautiful Saffiya who sets fire to herself and Ibrahim who loses his leg. We then follow Yahya as a young man, as he volunteers to fight in the 1967 war out of his love for Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser. However, defeat in the war means that his illusions quickly fade.

Egyptian writer Mohamed al-Refai is a cultural critic based in Cairo. He has written for the magazine Sabah al-Khair since 1980 and won the Mustapha and Ali Amin Prize for Journalism for his weekly column in 2000. He is also the author of a number of books on the theatre, including Palestine in Egyptian Theatre and Experiments in Arab Theatre. His radio screenplays include A Journey in Olden Times, Paradise Lost and Papers of the Barada River and he has written three series for television: The Overcoat, based on Nikolai Gogol's short story; The White based on Yusef Idriss' novel and The Extoller of the Moon, a programme about Baligh Hamdi, which is currently on air. He has also written screenplays for two films: The Case of Mr. Mungid and Stolen Dreams.

The Amazing Journey of Khair al-Din ibn Zard (pub. Dar Fada'at)
by
Ibrahim Zaarur (Jordan/Palestine)

This is a darkly comic and fast-paced stream of consciousness novel in which a lorry driver inherits 25 million dollars. Whilst he cannot believe that he will be rich, he soon gains a sense of himself and of his own importance and rich relatives acknowledge him after years of ignoring him. However, a surprise awaits him when he goes to collect the inheritance...

Ibrahim Zaarur was born in Palestine in 1939. He is a short story writer, novelist and journalist who has eight published novels. He currently lives in Amman, Jordan.

The Vagrant (pub. Dar al-Nahar)
by
Jabbour Douaihy (Lebanon)

The Vagrant provides a realistic, engaging portrayal of the Lebanese civil war through the eyes of a young man who finds himself uprooted by the conflict. The hero represents the crisis of the Lebanese individual imposed upon by a sectarian reality. We follow his struggle to belong as he faces unfamiliar situations and conflicts in a society that considers him an outsider.

Jabbour Douaihy was born in Zgharta, northern Lebanon, in 1949. He holds a PhD degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne and works as Professor of French Literature at the University of Lebanon. To date, he has published seven works of fiction, including novels, short stories and children’s books. His novel June Rain was shortlisted for the inaugural IPAF in 2008, and will be published in English by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in October 2012.

The Druze of Belgrade (pub. Al-Markez al-Thaqafi al-Arabi)
by
Rabee Jaber (Lebanon)

After the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon, a number of fighters from the religious Druze community are forced into exile, travelling by sea to the fortress of Belgrade on the boundary of the Ottoman Empire. In exchange for the freedom of a fellow fighter, they take with them a Christian man from Beirut called Hana Yaaqub; an unfortunate egg seller who happens to be sitting at the port. The Druze of Belgrade follows their adventures in the Balkans, as they struggle to stay alive.

Lebanese novelist and journalist Rabee Jaber was born in Beirut in 1972. He has been editor of Afaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat newspaper, since 2001. His first novel, Master of Darkness, won the Critics’ Choice Prize in 1992. He has since written 16 novels, including: Black Tea; The Last House; Yousif Al-Inglizi; The Journey of the Granadan (published in German in 2005), Berytus: A City Beneath the Earth (published in French by Gallimard in 2009) and America, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010.

The Women of al-Basatin (pub. Dar al-Adab)
by
Habib Selmi (Tunisia)

The Women of Al-Basatin is an intimate portrayal of the daily lives of a modest family living in the Al-Basatin district of Tunis in Tunisia. Through the stories of this small matriarchal environment, we observe the contradictions of the wider Tunisian society, exposing a world in flux between burdensome religious traditions and a troubled modernity.

Habib Selmi was born in al-’Ala, Tunisia, in 1951. He has published four novels and two collections of short stories. A number of the stories have been translated into English, Norwegian, Hebrew and French. His first novel, Jabal al-’Anz (Goat Mountain), was published in French translation in 1999. His 2001 novel, Ushaq Bayya (Bayya's Lovers) was published in French translation in 2003 and excerpted in Banipal 18. Other novels include Surat Badawi Mayyit (Picture of a Dead Bedouin), 1990, Matahat al-Raml (Sand Labyrinth), 1994, Hufar Dafi’a (Warm Pits), 1999, and Asrar ‘Abdallah (Abdallah’s Secrets), 2004. Habib Selmi has lived in Paris since 1985. His novel The Scents of Marie-Claire was shortlisted for IPAF in 2009. An English translation of the book was published by Arabia Books this year.

Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge (pub. Dar al-Ain)
by
Ezzedine Choukri Fishere (Egypt)

Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge is a novel about alienation in its various forms and senses: the hero who doesn’t belong; his second wife, torn between professional ambition and a desperation to give her husband the impression she belongs in his world; his son, with whom he has limited communication; his granddaughter, uncertain where she belongs, and his Egyptian friend, who discovers that neither his children nor his Cuban-American-Lebanese wife belong to his world. All these characters are linked by their relationship with the protagonist, who draws them together by inviting them to his granddaughter’s birthday party, at which he intends to convey some sad news.

Ezzedine Choukri Fishere is an Egyptian writer and diplomat. Born in Kuwait in 1966, he grew up in Egypt, where he graduated from Cairo University in 1987 with a BA in Political Science. After graduation, he attended a number of universities in France and Canada and attained an International Diploma in Administration from The National School of Administration, Paris (1990-92). He went on to gain a Masters in International Relations from Ottawa University (1992-95) and a doctorate in Political Science from Montreal University (1993-98). He currently teaches political science at the American University in Cairo, but also lectures at a number of other universities. In addition, he writes political articles for several Arabic, English and French periodicals and newspapers.

The Nabatean (pub. Dar al-Shorouq)
by
Youssef Ziedan (Egypt)

As in his earlier, IPAF-winning, novel Azazel Youssef Ziedan brings history to the reader in intimate detail, removing the halos from famous historical characters and transforming them into flesh and blood, with real dreams, mistakes and achievements, strong and weak points. This novel focuses on the fabled Nabateans – an ancient Arabic people living across the Middle East before the arrival of Christianity and Islam – who helped prepare the way for the Muslim conquest of Egypt.

A highly respected Egyptian scholar specialising in Arabic and Islamic studies, Youssef Ziedan (born June 30, 1958) is director of the Manuscript Centre and Museum affiliated to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. University professor, public lecturer, columnist and prolific author, he has written two critically acclaimed and best-selling novels Azazel (winner of IPAF 2009) and The Shadow of the Serpent. The English translation by Jonathan Wright of Azazel is due to be published by Atlantic Books in the UK in April 2012. Ziedan has worked as a consultant in the field of Arabic heritage preservation and conservation in a number of international institutions: UNESCO, ESCWA and the Arab League. He has also directed a number of projects aimed at the delimitation and preservation of Arabic manuscripts – the cataloguing, editing and publishing of these historic texts is something he is devoted to and they, in turn, influence and inform his fiction.

egyptian author & former mubarak photographer ahmed mourad interviewed by the observer

2011-11-19T11:15:00.007Z

above: Ahmed Mourad in his days as Mubarak's official photographer; photo published in The Observer newspaper

During his recent tour of England together with two other Egyptian novelists newly published in English by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP), Ahmed Mourad - author of the thriller Vertigo - surprised many with his revelation that he was for years official photographer to the now deposed President Husni Mubarak. For example, he spoke of his role as photographer during the appearance of the three writers at an evening reception and literary event at the residence of Egypt's ambassador to the UK Hatem Saif Al Nasr. Vertigo is published by BQFP in English translation by Adam Talib. The other two writers on the tour were Khaled AlKhamissi (author of Taxi, trans by Jonathan Wright), and Ahmed Khaled Towfik (Utopia, trans Chip Rossetti).

Now The Observer newspaper has published an interview with Mourad conducted by Peter Beaumont in which the writer speaks both on his role as Mubarak's photographer and as the author of Vertigo. The interview is headlined: "By day I shot my boss Hosni Mubarak. By night, I dreamt of dictator's downfall".

The interview begins: "Every day, Ahmed Mourad quietly seethed as he peered through a lens darkly at Hosni Mubarak and reflected on the misery that his boss – the man he knew as "Mr President" – was inflicting on Egypt's 80 million people.

"After five years as the personal photographer to Mubarak, recording everything from world leaders' visits to quotidian family gatherings, Mourad, then 29, had seen enough and was 'ready to explode', as he puts it now.

"That was in 2007, four years before the inspirational uprising that forced Mubarak out in February this year, after 30 years of dictatorship. At the time, thousands of workers were on strike and journalists were protesting about being silenced, but Tahrir Square was quiet. If you did not want to go to jail, with the attendant risk of being tortured, there was little outlet for political protest. So, in the evenings, Mourad vented his anger by writing.

"The result, later that year, was Vertigo, a racy, blood-spattered thriller that exposes the greedy, seedy, corrupt businessmen and politicians who get rich by exploiting the poor. It was a story that resonated in Egypt and the book – which Mourad says was never meant for publication – became a bestseller. Now, after its translation into English, he has talked for the first time about the emotions that inspired him to write it.

"'I was ready to explode because I had been living a dual life for five years, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' says the dapper, quietly spoken Mourad. 'During the day, I spent hours working with Hosni Mubarak – a man who had been burying the dreams of Egyptians for three decades – and at night I was with my friends, who were cursing him and wishing he would disappear. What was really making me angry was that I knew the Egyptian people were destined to live better and he was the reason why that wasn't happening.'.... more

جدارية سجن أبو سليم

2011-11-17T09:15:00.001Z

جدارية سجن أبو سليم

عاشور الطويب

قال لي شبيهي وهو معي في زنزانتي: أنت لست سوى حنجرة صارخة في البري.

صاح صوت واهن من آخر عنبر السجن: المغني هرم يا محمد الأمين1 وهرمنا معه ....لكننا نشهد تخليص البلاد من قبضة الطاغية. واجهني الجدار جملة صامتة. هذه صحراؤهم و صحراؤنا. بخطوط مستقيمة ومنحنية تصير بلادا و عباد. اقفلْ باب الزنزانة عليّ لا يهم، مفتاحها هاهنا بين أصابعي فحم أسود و حلم نافر. اقفلْ باب الزنزانة عليّ لا يهم، هواء بلادي لي و دحرجة الوقتِ بين دخول الصباح و رنين القوقعة لي. همس صوتٌ من أوّل عنبر السجنِ: يهزُّ الملكُ أوتارَ كمانه، العينان مقفلتان، يحلمُ بولائم الدم. يشدّني شجنٌ لصوتِ طفلي في مصراتة2. أحضنُ في القلب ضحكتَه المضمَّخة برائحة النعناع.

جالسٌ، ظلِّي رمادي وقلبي أبيض كالثلج. هناك، هناك على ربوة عالية صوتٌ عذبٌ.

يشدّني الشجنُ إلى ارجوحة أمي في مصراتة. احضنُ في القلب نَفَسَها المضمّخ بالقرنفل والزعتر البرّي.

"في الليل أيضا ينام الغبار"

قال شبيهي النائمُ بجانبي في ابوسليم3 في عنبر لستُ أذكرُ منه إلا رائحةَ الألم.

"فُلْكُ الراحلين على حَرْف البحر دهشةٌ و قلقْ، فأيّ الجياد سيعدو نحو شطآن السكونْ؟"

قلتُ والمساءُ البغيضُ لا يريد أن ينته: كنتُ أعلمُ أنَّ الحمَام سيجيء ذات صباح ويحطّ على نافذة زنزانتي العالية، سيحمل لي في منقاره الصغير نتفة من سحابة و على ظهره قطرة مطر. هذا الحزنُ كأنّي أعرفه! أبكي كلّما أراه...انني أبكي الآن.

حنجرةٌ تصيحُ: وطني يغيب أين؟ و سهمُ الكفِّ ممدودٌ في الفضاء بلا قصيدة.

من ذا يَقدِرُ أن يأخذَ حنجرةَ التاريخ؟.

خاطَبَهم رئيسُ السجن: أنتم في أسوء سجن على ظهر الكرة الأرضية. نحن نتعامل مع ثلاث أشياء فقط: 1- ثلاجة الموتى. 2- الكلاب المفترسة. 3- البحر كاتم الأسرار.

لم يسمعوا شيئا. كانت الحرب على أشدها.

أمامي سحبٌ بحجم الوطن... أيها ستمطر! ضباب كثيف! أحاول الرؤية من قريب.

الهواءُ لا يثبتُ على كلامٍ واحد. من أعلى يتساقط حَبُُّ الزمان، من أعلى يشيخُ المساء
وتتأرجحُ الطمأنينة على أعواد الكذب.

من تحت ماسورةالمدفع الطويلة لمِحَ نجمةً تقتربْ.

- مرّ على كتفه بندقية
-أين ؟
-في آخر الطريق.

قال شبيهي:

كلُّ عودٍ فيه ما فيه وكلُّ بلادٍ لها ساحةٌ للبكاءْ.

قلت: قدمٌ واحدة تبحث عن عتبة باب، يدٌ تعلّق في الهواء رمّانة فارغة.
اضْربْ طبولكَ واحْسبْ ميزانَ شهواتك بفتور اللحظةالهامشية.

"قد أكون بارعا في مراقبة النجوم في عتمة الليل" قال دون أن يلتفت إليهم, الذين حملهم النوم في مركبته الذهبية. لم تكن السماء المتلألأة بارعة في اخفاء ضحكتها, ولا الثعلب الصغير بارعا في الاقتراب, غير أنّ الكثيب كان يحلم بطوابير النمل الأسود تعبر فلوات الشتاء. "هيهات" قال وهو يرفع من على عينيه سحب الحزن الحامض، هيهات هيهات.

كم هشَّةٌ وقفةُ الرجل يفحصُ نسيجَ الحزن بيدين ترتعشان كم حادّةٌ ظلمة النهار و كم خائنة عيون القاتل. مُدَّ رأسك من البريقة4 إلى رأس لانوف5، لا تخف من ضيق الطريق، فقد تشتهي امرأة أو حنظلة مدورة ملساء قد تقطف دون أن تدري وردة القلب.

حلمتُ البارحة بعريشة بيتنا.لم أذق أطعم من عنب عريشة بيتنا. لم يكن بيني وبين أمي غير سحب بيضاء عابرة. رفعت عينيها، نادتني: محمد سيفتح الجبّ بابه وستطير في المدى الشاسع أحلامك فاغلق عينيك عند الفجر وادخل مدينتك العالية. سألتني: هل فتحت في جدارك كوّة، تمدّ المدينة منها يدها وتضع الحناء على أصابع الجموع النائمة معك؟

يا محمد ان طالت غيبتك فلأمر! ليس في يدي غير الغبار، ليس في العين غير البكاء، ليس في البرية غير الالم. فلتنتظر فجرا يطوي الأرض طيا ويشرب معك عصير البرتقال قبل أن يقوم الصباح من مكانه.

يا محمد، سأذهب الآن لأزرع ورودا حمراء في زنازين الميتين. سلام لك إلى قيام الساعة.

صرختُ عاليا: سلمي لي على أبي، قولي له لا يبكي عليّ، سأعود....سأعود.

على عريشة عنب بيتنا نامت الحناجر المتعبة....صمتا رجاء لا جلبة ولا ضوضاء.

قُربَ عشّ طائر الدوري وضعتُ لافتة بيتي ورأيتُ في السماء وجه أخي الحبيب.

سقطت من شجر قريب أصواتُ أنين. ليتني أقدرُ تقبيل عينيه، ليتني أجمع آهاته عنه، ليتني ....

"من أين يأت الظل؟" سأل سجاّنٌ "من أين ولا شمس تجلس في الزنزانة أو تلامس الجذار؟" قال ثانية.

سجدوا جميعا، سجدوا على ذراع ميّت. كانوا بعين واحدة. عين بلا حزن.

من يحمل حزني معي؟ من يحمل سجني معي؟ غابة من رجال، غابة من نساء و أطفال، غابة من عويل وضحك متقطع، غابة من أنفاس عطرة، غابة من شهيق وغابة من زفير، غابة من ظلال باردة، وغابة من رمل يابس ساخن، غابة من رياح و غبار، غابة من صهيل خيول برية، وغابة، غابة من عيون زوجتي البهية.

"ماذا في آخر الأخبار" يسأل سجانا سجينُ؟

-لا جديد في الحرب، لقد انتصرنا وستقتلون.

غابة من نواح وشجن. هل نامت القبرات في نافذة زنزانتي؟ لعلها صارت غابة من ريش وريح. إني متعب يا بلاد القناديل المطفأة6.

ما أوسع باب سجنك و ما اضيق صدرك. كيف استطعتَ قتل الزمن على عتبة زنزانتي؟ كيف مسحت بماء النار جبين عابري بّوابتك الصدئة؟ قلتَ لنا ستأكلكم أنيابُ النسيان.

قلتَ لنا ستعلّقون من خصّيكم على باب المدينة الشرقي. قلتَ لنا .....

-و لكن ما الفائدة....ستموتون على كل حال.

في غفلة عنك و عن حرّاسك، رفعتُ مئذنتي على كتفيّ. هيأتُ للأحباب وليمة و وتركتُ البحر على وسادتي كي يستريح. لو كنتَ تعلم أن الوادي قد صاحتْ عصافيرُه حين التفتُّ إلى آخر نهار ودخلتُ قبوكَ. في غفلة عنك و عن حّراسك، بارَكني الأنبياء. قد يضيق المكانُ على القادمين! قد يجيء المساءُ بلا ظلمة! قد يخون الجسدُ المدمّى! لكن سيعيش الوطن هنا أبدا،

سيعيش الوطن هنا أبدا، هنا أبدا.

ها قد جاءت الطيور إلى ميعاد الماء والطاعنون في السنّ يخيطون أفواه حكايات الحرب بحنكة بالغة.

مركبي عريُ الندى، جاءت به النباتات و الدعوات القديمة. الأذرع العالية بحري، موجه أشواق و زفرات خافتة. هلمّ إلي تقول الهتافات من وراء الجبل. هلمّ إليّ تقول الأناشيد من مصراتة.

كم خفيفة هي الحرية! و كم عظيم هو الانسان. ياه! ما أثقل العقود الأربعة الماضية.

شاعر ليبي، طرابلس

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هوامش:

محمد بن الأمين: رسام ليبي شاب سجن هو و أخوه الحبيب بن الأمين في الأسبوع الأول من ثورة 17 فبراير ضد القذافي وسجنا في سجن أبوسليم الشهير بطرابلس.

أفرج عنه الثوار يوم 20.8.2011 بعد تحرير طرابلس.

مصراتة : المدينة التي يقيم فيها الرسام وقد عانت دمارا كبيرا على يد كتائب القذافي لكنها انتصرت عليه.

أبوسليم: سجن رهيب مقتل فيه عام 1996 في ساعتين 1269 سجين سياسي وإلى حد الآن غير معروف أين دفنوا.

منطقة نفطية في شرق ليبيا

منطقة نفطية في شرق ليبيا

عنوان قصيدة لشاعر ليبي اسمه علي الرقيعي مات عام 1966
.

This poem by Libyan poet Ashur Twebi is posted on Misrata artist Mohammad Bin Lamin's Facebook album of his remarkable cell drawings and other prison art produced during his imprisonment in Abu Salim jail - from the start of the revolution until the liberation of that terrible place on 20 August 2011.

libyan artist mohammad bin lamin's facebook album of his abu salim prison art

2011-11-16T22:07:00.010Z

Following the trail from a Tweet and photo issued by Libyan writer, blogger and podcaster Ghazi Gheblawi, I am delighted to find that the famous Libyan artist from Misrata, Mohammad Bin Lamin, has assembled a fantastic album on Facebook of his art from Abu Salim Jail Tripoli where Bin Lamin was incarcerated throughout the revolution. I first wrote about his prison art on this blog on September 2, shortly after the liberation of Abu Salim jail. I based that piece on a news report from freed Abu Salim by the BBC's Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen. It is wonderful to now have the privilege of accessing Bin Lamin's full Facebook album of his prison art. As well as his wall drawings, they include haunting sculptures of faces of fellow-prisoners fashioned from silver foil food containers (a sample is above). The Facebook site has a page of information on Bin Lamin and his place in Libyan art. It includes material from Ghazi Gheblawi's blog Imtidad.

Mohammad Bin Lamin: My Drawings on the walls in Abu Salim Jail - 6.

Mohammad Bin Lamin was seized by Gaddafi forces from his Misrata studio on 18 February, together with his poet brother Elhabib Elamin, and taken off to Abu Salim jail in Tripoli. The drawing below bears both their names:

Mohammad Bin Lamin: My Drawings on the walls in Abu Salim Jail - 10.

Mohammad Bin Lamin: My Drawings on the walls in Abu Salim Jail - 11.

only one woman on 13-strong 'arabic booker prize' - IPAF - longlist

2011-11-10T15:29:00.019Z

International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 2012 longlist is announced
by
Susannah Tarbush

The longlist of 13 novels competing for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - popularly knows as the 'Arabic Booker'), worth a total of $60,000 to the winner, was announced today. The entrants comprised 101 novels from 15 countries, published in the past 12 months. It is striking that there is only one woman among the longlist's 13 authors - in statistical terms, 7.7% of the list. The sole woman on the 2012 longlist is Iraqi-Danish writer Hawra al-Nadawi for Under the Copenhagen Sky (Dar al-Saqi). Al-Nadawi left Iraq with her family for political reasons when she was six. She grew up in Denmark learnt Arabic at home, and lives in London.

Under the Copenhagen Sky (Taht Sama' Kobinhaghin) by Hawra al-Nadawi

This low female presence on the longlist is in marked contrast to last year when the 16-book longlist included seven women - ie 43.8% - the highest proportion in the prize’s history. The chairman of the 2011 IPAF judges, Iraqi poet and novelist Fadhil al-Azzawi, said when the 2011 longlist was announced: "We are delighted with the very high percentage of women who reached the longlist compared with previous years.” It is understood that 2011 was an exceptional year for the proportion of women writers from whom IPAF entries came; presumably publishers submitted a lower proportion for the 2012 prize.

In each of the first three IPAF shortlists, there was only one woman among the six shortlistees. In 2011 there were two. The organisers and judges of IPAF have stuck to the principle, as surely they must, that works submitted just be judged solely on literary merit and that there should be no tokenism as regards gender of geography. The low representation of women on the IPAF longlist raises wider questions about women and the Arab literary and publishing scene. Complaints about the low representation of women in a literary prize are hardly unique to IPAF or the Arab world: it was unhappiness about a perceived male dominance of the Booker Prize that led to the launching in the UK in 1996 of the Orange Prize for fiction by women.

For the first time in the first four years of IPAF's existence the 2011 prize went to a woman - Saudi writer Raja Alem for The Doves’ Necklace. The co-winner was Moroccan Mohammed Achaari with The Arch and the Butterfly. The Doves’ Necklace, for which London-based Andrew Nurnberg Associates is the UK agent, recently secured English-language publishing deals with The Overlook Press in America and Duckworth Books in the UK. Achaari’s novel will be published in English translation by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) in 2012.

Stephanie Gorton of Overlook Press said when the Alem deal was announced: "Overlook is proud to be publishing this book for an English-language readership. We are excited to collaborate with Raja Alem, who has overcome significant obstacles to gain recognition for her brilliant writing and as the first woman to win the IPAF. The Doves' Necklace is a dark, elegant, and wonderfully entertaining novel that deserves all the acclaim it has received, and is sure to receive in the future."

The longlisted authors are from seven countries. Lebanon and Egypt each have four authors on the list, while Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia and Jordan are each represented by a single author. A Saudi novelist won the prize in 2010 and 2011, but the 2012 longlist has no novel from Saudi Arabia or any other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state, nor from Yemen. The 2011 longlist had two works by Morcccan novelists (both of them former ministers of culture) which made it to the shortlist, and one of which won IPAF, but Morocco does not feature on the 2012 longlist and neither does Libya.

IPAF says: A number of the longlisted novels have a Lebanese war theme: other common themes include displacement – both for expatriate Arabs and those who have lost loved ones in childhood – and the challenge of rediscovering one’s roots and identity.”

The longlist includes a previous winner of the prize, Egyptian Youssef Ziedan with The Nabatean. Ziedan won IPAF in 2009 for Azazel, due to be published in English translation by Atlantic Books in the UK in April 2012.

Youssef Ziedan

The $60,000 cash prize, first awarded in 2008, is composed of the prize of $50,000 plus the $10,000 that goes to each of the six shortlisted books. IPAF was launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007, and is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation and by the Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy. The Foundation funds the prize, which is also supported by Abu Dhabi International Book Fair and Etihad Airways.

The shortlist will be announced on 7 December in Cairo and the winner in Abu Dhabi on 27 March on the eve of the Abu Dhabi Inernational Book Fair held from 28 March – 2April.

As in previous years the identity of the judges is still secret at this stage in the judging process. IPAF says only that the judges are “five specialists in the field of Arabic literature”. The judges’ names will not be disclosed until 7 December when the shortlist is announced. The as-yet-unidentified chair of the judges said today: “The fifth cycle of IPAF takes place in exceptional circumstances, with many Arab uprisings against despotic regimes which have been entrenched in most regions of the Arab world for long decades."

He or she added: “Without actually asserting that the novels nominated for this prize cycle directly prophesy the Arab Spring, we can say that many of them paint a picture of the stifling conditions prevalent before the explosion of uprisings. They take the reader into the underground world of the secret police and portray the thirst for freedom of many of their heroes and secondary characters, at the same time exposing the opportunism of those who co-operate with those secret forces.”

The longlist includes three writers who were shortlisted, but did not win, in previous years. They are Jabbour Douaihy of Lebanon (shortlisted for June Rain in 2008); Tunisian Habib Selmi (The Scents of Marie-Claire, 2009) and Lebanese Rabee Jaber (America, 2010). Ezzedine Choukri Fishere was longlisted for the Prize in 2009, for Intensive Care.

Fadi Azzam

Also on the longlist is Syrian author Fadi Azzam whose longlisted novel Sarmada was recently launched in London in English translation, by Adam Talib, as the first title of new imprint Swallow Editions the brain child of the Germany-based German-writing Syrian writer Rafik Schami.

The eponymous location of Azzam’s novel is a Druze village in southern Syria, and the novel is steeped in Druze tradition and culture. There is also another Druze-related novel on the longlist: The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber, set in Ottoman times. A new novel by the prolific Jaber, born in Beirut in 1972 and one of the Beirut39 athors, was recently published under the title Tuyyur Holiday Inn (The Birds of Holiday Inn - Dar al Tanwir, Beirut).

The New York district of Brooklyn features for the second year running in the title of a longlisted book, Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by Egyptian Ezzedine Choukri Fishere (published by Dar al-Ain). The 2011 longlist featured Brooklyn Heights by Egyptian Miral el-Tahawi, which progressed to the shortlist.

The fact that four of the 13 longlisted authors have previouly been shortlisted in the four IPAF judging cycles, with one of them being an IPAF winner, may give rise to concerns that IPAF is not spreading its net widely enough. But equally it could be seen as testimony to the record of certain Arab authors in regularly producing high-quality works of fiction. There may also be resentment that Egypt and Lebanon between them account for authorship 8 of the 13 books. But this continuing dominance of Egypt and Lebanon is hardly surprising, given the historical pre-eminence of these two countries in Arab writing and publishing.

The announcement of the longlist is bound to increase speculation as to the identity of the judges during the four weeks remaining until their identity is unveiled. IPAF and its PR Colman Getty of London exercise utmost discretion and were today unwilling to identify all 15 countries from whose authors books were submitted for IPAF 2012 least this makes it possible to identify at least some of those submissions which have failed to make the longlist.

The 2012 IPAF longlist (authors in alphabetical order)

Sarmada
by Fadi Azzam
Syria
publisher: Thaqafa

Paving the Sea
By Rashid al-Daif
Lebanon
Riyad al-Rayyes

The Vagrant
by Jabbour Douaihy
Lebanon
Dar al-Nahar

Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge
by Ezzedine Choukri Fishere
Egypt
Dar al-Ain

Rabee Jaber

The Druze of Belgrade
by Rabee Jaber
Lebanon
Al-Markez al-Thaqafi al-Arabi

The Unemployed
by Nasr Iraq
Egypt
Al-Dar al-Masriya al-Lubnaniya

Toy of Fire
by Bashir Mufti
Algeria
Al-Ikhtilef

Under the Copenhagen Sky
by Hawra al-Nadawi
Iraq/Denmark
Dar al-Saqi

Suitcases of Memory
by Sharbel Qatan
Lebanon
Naufel

Nocturnal Creatures of Sadness
by Mohamed al-Refai
Egypt
Dar Merit

Habib Selmi

The Women of al-Basatin
by Habib Selmi
Tunisia
Dar al-Adab

The Amazing Journey of Khair al-Din ibn Zard
by Ibrahim al-Zaarur
Jordan
Dar Fada'at

The Nabatean
by Youssef Ziedan
Egypt
Dar al-Shorouq

from the IPAF Press Release issued through Colman Getty:

The Prize, which celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2012, has become a leading cultural event in the Arab world. Lauded as the ‘foremost literary award for writing in Arabic’ (The National) and ‘the yardstick of literary excellence’ (The Times), it is the first of its kind in the Arab world in its commitment to independence, transparency and integrity. Its aim is to celebrate the very best of contemporary Arabic fiction and encourage wider international readership of Arabic literature through translation.

In the past five years the Prize has secured English translations for all of its winners: Bahaa Taher (2008), Youssef Ziedan (2009), Abdo Khal (2010) and joint winners Mohammed Achaari and Raja Alem (2011). Taher’s Sunset Oasis was translated into English by Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton) in 2009 and has gone on to be translated into at least eight languages worldwide. Ziedan’s Azazel will be published in the UK by Atlantic Books in April 2012, and Abdo Khal and Mohammed Achaari’s books will also be published in 2012, by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing. Raja Alem’s The Doves’ Necklace has recently secured an English language publisher, with The Overlook Press in America and Duckworth Books in the UK. All of the winning titles, and a significant number of shortlisted and longlisted books have been translated internationally in South America, Europe and Asia.

Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Board of Trustees, commented: “Five years on, it is hugely gratifying to see how the prize is fulfilling its purpose: to recognise and reward the best of Arabic literature and to encourage translation internationally. We are also delighted to see how the prize has stimulated Arabic fiction writing, as a genre.”

Salwa Mikdadi, Head of Arts & Culture Programme at the Emirates Foundation, adds: “The Prize continues to garner regional and international interest in Arabic literature, as evident in the multiple editions and the translations into over twelve languages. The Foundation is proud to continue its support of the Prize in its fifth year.”

For further information about the Prize, visit www.arabicfiction.org or follow the prize on Facebook

The first five winners of the Prize are:

2008: Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (Egypt)
2009: Azazel by Youssef Ziedan (Egypt)
2010: Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Abdo Khal (Saudi Arabia)
2011: The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari (Morocco) and The Doves' Necklace by Raja Alem (Saudi Arabia)

In addition to the annual Prize, IPAF supports an annual Nadwa (writers’ workshop) for emerging writers from across the Arab world. The inaugural Nadwa took place in November 2009 and included eight writers, who had been recommended by IPAF Judges as writers of exceptional promise. The result was eight new pieces of fiction which have been published in English and Arabic by Dar Al Saqi Books in Emerging Arab Voices: Nadwa1, which was launched at Sharjah International Book Fair on 27 October 2010 and in the UK in January 2011. Two further workshops took place in Abu Dhabi, in October 2010 and October 2012. All three nadwas were run under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Ruler's Representative in the Western Region, UAE.

'poetry towards peaceful coexistence': forums held in Dubai and London

2011-11-01T16:52:00.010Z

above: a video of highlights from the Dubai Forum and the Mosaic Rooms event in London

Poetry Towards Peaceful Coexistence

An event held at the Mosaic Rooms in central London on 19 October discussed the themes that emerged at The Foundation of Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain's Prize for Poetic Creativity’s literary and intellectual symposium held in Dubai on 16-18 October.

The Dubai forum, entitled "Poetry Towards Peaceful Co-Existence", was held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, who attended the opening session. The London forum was programmed to complement the subject areas debated in Dubai.

The two events were linked by author and broadcaster Paul Blezard, who flew from Dubai to London, to participate in both Forums. In London he gave a vivid account of what he had witnessed in Dubai. He named two Arab poets who had "just astonished with their performance" and who had received massive applause: 22-year-old Dalal al-Baroud who is from Kuwait and Sudanese TV presenter Rawda al-Haj who is quite well known and whose poetry is "just extraordinary" in its imagery and rhyme forms.

In his opening speech in Dubai, Abdul Aziz Saud Al-Babtain [pictured], Chairman of The Foundation, highlighted the role of poetry in promoting dialogue between civilisations and said that the decision to hold the event in Dubai reflected the Emirate’s leading role in bringing about peaceful coexistence and understanding between people from different cultural backgrounds.

The speakers who took part in the London event were:

• Rosie Goldsmith, journalist and broadcaster, chair
• Sarah Ardizzone, award winning translator
• Sharmila Beezmohun, deputy editor Wasafiri magazine [pictured]
• Paul Blezard, Literary director, The Firebird Poetry Prizes
• Christina Patterson , writer and columnist, The Independent
• Rhona Wells, assistant editor, The Middle East magazine

The Dubai Forum was attended by Arab and foreign academics and poets from five continents. The sessions discussed the impact of Arabic and world poetry on human communication throughout the ages, and there were readings from an international line up of poets including prolific writer and poet Yang Lian from Beijing, who lives in exile in London; Egyptian poet and writer Yaser Anwar; poet and cultural critic Kirpal Singh from Singapore; American poet, essayist and professor Brian Turner and the International Kristal Vilenica Prize 2009 winner Luljeta Lleshanaku from Albania.

Abdul Aziz Saud Al-Babtain, a prominent Kuwaiti poet and businessman, established and fully financed The Foundation of Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain's Prize for Poetic Creativity. He also established The Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Prize for Imam Al-Bukhari's Grandchildren, an annual prize of U.S. $100,000 to restore the genuine cultural bridges between the Arab Nation and the recently independent Asian Islamic states.

Al-Babtain said: “I am delighted with the response to the Forum in Dubai. Academics and poets travelled from far and wide to take part in the symposium, and the result was three days of inspiring speeches and debate. Speakers were in general agreement with the theme of this year’s Forum – that poetry can play a role in developing cultural understanding in a time of political, social and economic change around the world.”

Al-Babtain, recently appointed as Honorary President of the Verona-based World Poetry Academy continued: “A specific message of Arabic poetry is that to move forward, there needs to be an understanding between cultures and people, and The Foundation will continue with its work to champion the importance of poetry in our contemporary world.”

The "Poetry Towards Peaceful Co-Existence" themes were: ‘The image the of Other in Ancient Arabic Poetry’, ‘The Image of the East in World Poetry’, The Image of the Other in Modern Arabic Poetry and ‘Horizons of Exchange’. The seminars featured renowned academics including Juan Pedro Sala from Spain, Dr. Barbara Makhalak from Poland, Dr. Natalia Klimanin from Russia, and Dr. John-Claude Villain from France.

Paul Blezard [pictured] said: "It was a privilege to be invited to perform poetry in Dubai as the guest of the Abdul Aziz Saud Al-Babtain Foundation. Delegates, professors, poets, critics and publishers from all corners of the Arabic speaking - and writing - world mingled with non-Arabic poets and academics. Their time on stage in Dubai was used to great effect, opening the audiences to regions of the world, modes of thought and poetic forms that were as diverse as they were accomplished.”

Blezard added: “To find myself discussing nursery rhymes as early poetic influences with poets from Albania to Saudi Arabia, and to talk about Dante with Kuwaiti, Sudanese and Egyptian poets makes me think that, while poetry may not cure the world’s ills, it certainly opens up communication, discourse and friendships that will endure across the boundaries of distance, politics and language. The Al-Babtain Foundation should be lauded for providing the opportunity and means for such exchanges to happen.”

Blezard observed: "There are, I am given to understand, still areas and countries in which poetry is the medium of the news, where poets have not only the right - because of their stature and standing within the societies in which they live - but also the responsibility to say the harsh truths that cannot be said more modern mass media forms... poets are allowed to say the unsayable still."

He said: "I was astonished at how controversial some of the poems I heard were against the leaders of the nations from which some of the poets came, against the governments, against the frustrations of the recent revolutions."

Rosie Goldsmith [pictured], who chaired the London event, said: “Poetry Towards Peaceful Co-Existence was an incredibly ambitious topic to debate, and a hugely ambitious aim for all of us who both love poetry and long for peace. Poetry can and should play a part in developing a broader understanding between different cultures, but this is a subject for a much longer debate.”

three egyptian authors at residence of egypt's ambassador to uk

2011-10-30T19:40:00.015Z

HE Hatem Saif Al Nasr

The recent tour of England by three Egyptian authors whose bestselling Arabic novels are newly published in English translation by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) had a wide geographical scope. The three writers - Khaled AlKhamissi, Ahmed Mourad and Ahmed Khaled Towfik - participated in literary events in cities from Durham in the north and Cambridge in East Anglia to the Southbank Centre in London and Bristol in the south west. Also in the south west, AlKhamissi appeared at two events at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

But the event held at the splendid residence in South Audley Street, London, of the Egyptian ambassador to the UK HE Mr Hatem Saif Al Nasr at the invitation of Bloomsbury Publishing and the Ambassador, at which the guests included many Egyptians, had a particular resonance.

The event began with a minute's silence to remember the martrys of the revolution. In his opening speech the ambassador thanked his "dear friend" Bloomsbury’s founder and chief executive Nigel Newton, and Bloomsbury itself, for bringing to London and to a wider English audience three of Egypt’s “most renowned authors and their brilliant literary works. We are delighted to welcome Khaled AlKhamissi, Ahmed Mourad and Ahmed Khaled Towfik the authors of Taxi, Vertigo and Utopia, indeed three of the most successful and bestselling novels in Egypt in recent years.

“The three novels tell – each from a different angle yet all in unique and beautiful styles – important aspects of the story of Egyptian society’s journey to Tahrir Square... This is a story well worth telling, because it shows not only how our society evolved over recent years, but also how its people’s ingenuity preserved its historical accumulation of civility and humanity.”

The books, as different as they are, “were able to capture the humour, the temperament and the values of the Egyptian People and their undiminished eternal hope and optimism for a better tomorrow. Furthermore, you will also discover how our guest authors employed their narrative skills to shed light on some trends, patterns and challenges which we –as a people – will have to grapple with as we look ahead towards a brighter future for our society.”

The ambassador concluded: “One wonders if all of this and the other rich cultural expressions on the Egyptian scene during the past 10 years were a precursor, a bellwether to the civilized and peaceful Egyptian revolution of January 25th. The judgment is up to you…”

BQFP is a partnership of Bloomsbury Publishing of London and the Qatar Foundation. As well as publishing the three authors’ novels in English translation, it publishes the Arabic editions of Utopia and Vertigo outside Egypt: within Egypt the Arabic rights remain with the original publisher, Dar Merit.

Newton said that 18 months ago BQFP launched a new list of fiction and non-fiction from the Arab world. "This list is growing fast and earning recognition from many quarters. The Independent newspaper recently praised our enterprising list of Arabic fiction.”

Newton recommended the three books by the tour authors as “outstanding examples of contemporary Egyptian writing – they are not only by fine writers but offer valuable insights into the political transformations currently being experienced in Egypt.”

During the event the three writers were interviewed by BQFP consultant publisher Andy Smart, and then answered questions from the audience.

Asked about the inspiration for his debut political thriller Vertigo, Ahmed Mourad (33) explained that he had “worked with Mr Hosni Mubarak for 10 years from 2002 till the last 18 days [of his rule] as his personal photographer ...the atmosphere of the political layer of this society inspired me to write Vertigo.” It was a question of observing this stratum’s behaviour and treatment of others, and also its language: “Any layer in society has a slang – those people have a slang too.” He likened his novel to cutting through the layers of a cake. “My hero Ahmed Kamal is a wedding photographer for example, very low class” yet working in close proximity to the upper classes.

Mourad graduated from the High Cinema Institute in 2001 intending to work in film and media but found himself working on music video clips. He found this somewhat insubstantial, “like my footsteps on sand in the sea”, and started writing as a form of “therapy from our problems in Egypt”.

He started working on Vertigo while sitting in the rotating restaurant on the 40th floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo, waiting for a friend who was working in the hotel. Two businessmen plus bodyguards sat down beside him and he started to fantasise about their world and what they might be discussing. When they left “I wrote a scene from Vertigo – the assassination scene – imagining what might happen if some people came and assassinated all these people and me too! And this was the first page of Vertigo.”

He says it was his wife who eventually persuaded him that what he had written was a novel and that it should be submitted to a publisher. The novel was published by Dar Merit. He has continued to pursue a career in both writing fiction and in movie making, and has written the film script for Vertigo and for his second novel.

Mourad was asked whether he plans to write about what he saw while working as Mubarak’s personal photographer. “For me a photographer is like a doctor – I can’t tell my patient’s secrets” he said, but added: “If I write something it will not be now, it will be after 10 years when everything settles... in Egypt people are angry from the last regime, and if I write something now I have two choices: people may say I’m not angry enough, or the opposite. I prefer to wait for some years to make it more accurate."

Khaled AlKhamissi , born in 1962, said he is from the generation “that lived the fall of culture in Egypt”. He remembers the deterioration of culture in the 1970s and 1980s, with the closure of many bookshops, cinemas and theatres. He traced this to the 1967 defeat by Israel, subsequent US hegemony in the region, and Sadat’s policies as president. In 1971 a war was launched against the cultural intelligentsia, whose members tended to be Leftist. Khaled’s father, the famous poet, writer and journalist Abdel Rahman Al-Khamissi was phoned by Sadat who told him he liked him very much - and was giving him four days notice to leave the country, otherwise he would be jailed. Many other writers and intellectuals also left Egypt. Abdel Rahman remained in exile until his death in 1987, when his body was returned to Egypt.

After the decades of cultural stagnation “what happened in the last five years was for me a total surprise,” AlKhamissi said. “It was a cultural revolution – we had more writers, more bookshops, more cinemas, more theatres, more music troupes, more everything. What we experienced this year was totally related to this huge cultural revolution that happened in Egypt beginning in 2004, 2005.

“This cultural revolution had a mainly youth clientele –we have to know that two thirds of the Egyptian population are under 25 years... We cannot understand really the phenomena of publishing in Egypt and the phenomenon of best selling without understanding the boom of culture, which is totally related to political crisis and economical crisis. The youth are searching for a land to stand on, and during that search they use culture to try to understand where they have to go, and this is totally related to what happened this year.”

Khaled AlKhamissi

Khaled AlKhamissi grew up in the house of his late mother’s father, the great writer, poet, critic and translator Moufid El Choubachi (born in 1899). Khaled’s mother, the TV actress Faten Choubachi, died in 1968 at the age of only 32. His uncles Ali El Choubachi and Cherif El Choubachi are, among other things, important writers.

AlKhamissi had wanted to write from the age of 14. His grandfather’s house was home to novelists and poets and he asked himself how he could write in this milieu.“It was impossible as a matter of fact – and I remember that everything I wrote I put very quickly in the garbage. I was very anxious that the paper should be totally torn up because I was afraid that someone would read what I wrote. My grandfather was a great critic and I was really afraid that he might read something I wrote, which I felt was really nothing.”

In addition, in the 1980s and 1990s and until 2005 every time he wanted to write he would ask himself – why? “And I didn’t have an answer to this simple question, why. There was no reason at all. No readers, no bookshops, nothing."

It took him 25 years to become a writer. “And when I wrote I tried to write something totally different as in the matter of the literary form, and in the matter of the language and in the matter of the technique of writing. I tried to make something really different, to make my grandfather happy."

AlKhamissi added: “I’ll tell you something very personal: I didn’t find any happiness during my whole life till 2005 when I began to write. This was totally linked to what was happening - in 2005 there were parliamentary elections, a presidential election, constitutional changes to try to ensure Gamal Mubarak would succeed Husni. It was a catastrophic situation that made society shake and I found that a lot of people began to want, exactly like me, to speak loudly."

AlKhamissi's debut novel Taxi was published by Dar El Shorouk of Cairo in 2006. It takes the form of 58 fictional conversations between the first-person narrator and Cairo taxi drivers. The novel teems with humour and tragedy, and became an instant best seller. It was subsequently published by the now defunct British publisher Aflame Books in English translation by Jonathan Wright. The translator has improved the text for the English edition now launched by BQFP.

The British novelist Maggie Gee wanted to know whether Egyptian taxi drivers ever talk to AlKkhamissi about Taxi, and whether in Egypt there is a smaller gap than in Britain between highbrow and popular fiction. AlKhamissi said he didn't think taxi drivers read his novel. With 55 to 58 per cent of Egyptians living under the poverty line, taxi drivers are totally caught up in the struggle for survival and "these people in this poverty cannot for sure read a book".

On the question of the distinction between popular and non-popular fiction in Egypt, he said this had been through various phases in the past century."In the first phase from the beginning of 20th century until the 1940s for example we had popular fiction and non-popular fiction. During the 50s and 60s, with Nasser and the revolution dream, pop fiction was gone and we had "serious" fiction you may say. In the 70s, 80s, 90s, we lost culture totally, and for the past 15 years we have been trying to make a road."

Ahmed Khaled Towkik (left) Ahmed Mourad (right)

Ahmed Khaled Towfik is the prolific author of 500 works. “I’m famous in Egypt among the youth, in pop culture,” he said. He writes in the range of 17,000 to 40,000 words, novella length, for the 19-39 age group. Utopia was his first experiment in addressing an audience wider than a youth readership.

He spoke of the rewarding nature of writing for a young audience with its appetite for reading; after all, “no singer likes to sing to the deaf”. He values the feedback from the youth. “When I write something bad they say to me it’s bad, we hated what you wrote, when I write something good they say we love you very much ... When you write for them you feel you are alive”.

Utopia is a dystopian novel set in Egypt in 2030. The wealthy are living in gated communities in the north, insulated from life outside. He described the novel as “a form of prophecy” and “psychological therapy for myself because I felt the danger is coming – as I said once in my writing, if you squeeze Utopia, pus will fall from it, because it’s full of fear, full of anger.” He had sensed that disaster was approaching: “I began to understand that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and that one day the poor will be the amusement of the rich... the rich will start hunting the poor just for fun.”

He imaged that the situation would end in revolution. “I didn’t know what would happen in this revolution, but I predicted that the revolution would be done by the lower classes. This didn’t happen in January, when it happened through middle class youth who enter Facebook and have the picture of Che Guevara in their bedrooms.”

Ahmed Mourad

Asked whether the slang in his novel posed a particular challenge for the translator, Ahmed Mourad said: “Bloomsbury chose Robin Moger who’s a very talented translator, very professional. He lived in Egypt for eight years I believe, and he knows Egyptian slang very well. Every weekend Robin sent me a report on 10 or 12 words he wanted me to translate because he didn’t know the meaning.” An example was shankouti which seems to roughly translate as wheeler-dealer.

Ahmed Khaled Towfik said: “My translator Chip Rossetti would send me questions on words he didn’t understand, or that he just found it difficult to use or which had no parallel for him.” He added: “Slang is changing every day in Egypt with the very rapid social changes that are occurring. My son uses some words that I don’t understand, very strange words. When I learn these words he says I am very old and that these words are old!”

As the event was drawing to a close Ahmed Khaled Towfik asked to have a final word. He said that globalisation has helped increase interest in Arabic literature, and that it is now easier for Arab authors to have their work translated. Naguib Mahfouz had to wait a long time for his work to be translated, but “now it’s very rapid and active process... I think that some of the works that paved the way for this are the works of Alaa al-Aswany. The Yacoubian Building made youth interested in literature and made the world interested in Arabic literature, and I should thank him for this."
Susannah Tarbush

start of 3rd ipaf nadwa with 8 emerging arab writers

2011-10-24T10:30:00.008+01:00

Mansoura Ez Eldin: a mentor for the Nadwa

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, often referred to as the Arabic Booker) has announced the names of the eight emerging Arab writers who are particpating in its third annual writers' workshop. The workshop, known as the Nadwa, started today in Abu Dhabi and ends on Monday 31 October. It is supported by IPAF and the Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy, under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Ruler's Representative in the Western Region.

The writers, three female and five male, are: Rasha al-Atrash (Lebanon), Ali Ghadeer (Iraq), Waleed Abdulla Hashim (Bahrain), Sara Abd al-Wehab al-Drees (Kuwait), Mohamed ould Mohamed Salem (Mauritania), Muhsin Suleiman (UAE), and Mahmoud al-Rahby and Jokha al-Harthi (both from Oman). The writers range in age from 24 to 42.

The list has a strong Gulf emphasis, with five writers from GCC countries (Oman gets two bites of the cherry) and one from Iraq. There is no writer from the three Arab countries - Libya, Tunisia and Egypt - where popular uprisings have toppled the leaders. The Libyan writer Mohamed Mesrati tells me that he was invited to the Nadwa, but that the UAE declined to give him a visa because of his status as a Libyan refugee. At 21, he would have been the youngest participant in the Nadwa by three years.

However, the Nadwa does have a mentor from Egypt. The two mentors are former IPAF shortlistees: Egyptian novelist and journalist Mansoura Ez Eldin and Sudanese writer Amir Tag Elsir [pictured]. Ez Eldin was shortlisted for IPAF 2010 her novel Beyond Paradise, and Tag Elsir was shortlisted for IPAF 2011 for The Larvae Hunter. Ez Eldin participated in the inaugural Nadwa in 2009 and went on to mentor the second in 2010. Under the mentors' guidance, the writers will be encouraged to examine each others’ work as well as discuss broader subjects of literary interest, such as the use of dialect in fiction. During the Nadwa each of the eight eight promising young writers will produce a new piece of creative writing - either a short story or a chapter of a novel.

“The Nadwa offers a unique opportunity for emerging Arab writers to receive constructive feedback from their peers," says Salwa Mikdadi, head of the Arts and Culture Programme of the Emirates Foundation. "Initiatives like the Nadwa motivate the local cultural scene in the UAE. Every edition of the Nadwa offers talented new Emirati writers a platform to enrich their writing experience.”

The eight young authors had work submitted for IPAF in the past year, and were commended by the IPAF judges. Iraqi writer Fadhil al-Azzawi, chair of the 2011 IPAF judges, comments:

“I am delighted that some of the emerging voices whose work was submitted for the Prize will be participating in the Nadwa and be mentored by one of our 2011 shortlisted authors. The Prize has a special interest in developing the abilities of promising young Arab writers, and the Nadwa aims to do this by encouraging the mutual exchange of literary experience amongst the participants and between the participants and the mentors, dedicated writers with exceptional experience who are capable of editing, directing and developing the texts shown to them by these new writers.”

IPAF, which is supported by the Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy, is now entering its fifth year. It aims to recognise and reward excellence in contemporary Arabic creative writing and to encourage wider international readership of Arabic literature of the highest quality. IPAF also aims to encourage the writing of high quality literature and the Nadwa accords with this aim. Meanwhile, the judging process for IPAF 2012 is in full swing: the longlistwill be announced on 10 November, the shortlist on 7 December, and the winner on 27 March next year.

The inaugural Nadwa in 2009 resulted in eight pieces of new fiction which were published in English and Arabic in Emerging Arab Voices 1 by Dar Al Saqi Books. The publication of a second volume, of writing from the 2010 workshop, is currently under discussion.

the eight emerging writers:

Rasha al-Atrash is a Lebanese writer and journalist. She has worked on the Al-Safir newspaper and currently writes for Al-Hayat. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, London. Her novel Soap was published by Saqi Books in 2010. She won first prize in the How to Write a Novel workshop, as part of UNESCO’s Beirut: World Book Capital in 2009.

Ali Ghadeer is an Iraqi writer and journalist, born in in 1971. He obtained a BA in military science at a military college in from Baghdad in 1993. He has worked for a number of Iraqi newspapers and civilian organisations, and is the author of a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry and prose and a novel.

Jokha al-Harthi is an Omani writer, born in 1978. She teaches Arabic Literature in Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. She has a doctorate in literature from Edinburgh University, Scotland and has published two novels, two collections of short stories, a volume of prose and poetry and a children's story. Some of her work has been published in translation, in English for Banipal Magazine and in German for Lisan Magazine.

Waleed Abdulla Hashim is a Bahraini novelist, born in1982. He began writing at an early age and his first novel, I Was Not There, was published by Dar al-Konooz in 1999, whilst he was still at secondary school. He completed his higher education in the UK and holds an LLB in Law from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. He currently works in Bahrain as a novelist, lawyer and legal advisor. His other novels are: Across Another Life (2006, Arabic Institute of Research and Publishing) and Glanced Visions from Yarmuq (2009, Al-Intishar Institute).

Sara Abd al-Wehab al-Drees is a Kuwaiti writer, born in 1987. She has a BA in Sociology and Administration from Kuwait University. She writes a weekly column in the Kuwaiti Al-Ra'i newspaper and is a member of the Kuwaiti Journalists' Association. She was the head of the literary cultural club of Kuwait University for the academic year 2010-11. She has published two novels herself and the third was published by Dar al-Fikr al-Arabi.

Mohamed ould Mohamed Salem is a Mauritanian journalist, writer and novelist. He was born in 1969 in Wadi Naga, Mauritania, and has a BA in Arabic Language and Literature. He has published three novels: Things from an Old World (2007, Dar Yusef bin Tashfin, Mauritania), Memory of the Sand (2008, Dar al-Aman, Rabat, Morocco) and The Paths of Abd al-Barka (2010, Culture and Media Department, Government of Sharja, UAE). He is an editor of the Al-Khalij newspaper in the UAE.

Muhsin Suleiman is an Emirati writer, born in 1976. He has written plays, screenplays and the short story collection Behind the Hanging Curtains, which was published by the Sharjah Department of Culture. He has won awards for a number of his works and often participates in cultural activities, both within and outside the UAE.

Mahmoud al-Rahby is an Omani writer. He was born in 1969 in the village of Sarur, Oman. He holds a BA in Arabic Literature from King Mohamed the Fifth University in Morocco. He has published four short story collections and two novels. His collection Why Don't you Joke with Me? won the Best Short Story Prize at the Muscat Book Fair in 2008 and another collection, Seesawing above Two Times, won the Dubai Cultural Prize in 2009.

the two mentors:

Egyptian novelist and journalist Mansoura Ez Eldin was born in Delta Egypt in 1976. She studied journalism at the Faculty of Media, Cairo University and her work has since published short stories in various newspapers and magazines: she published her first collection of short stories, Shaken Light, in 2001. This was followed by two novels, Maryam's Maze in 2004 and Beyond Paradise in 2009, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, including an English translation of Maryam's Maze (translated by Professor Paul Starkey) published by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press. This year, she was selected for the Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors below the age of 40. She was also a participant of the inaugural Nadwa in 2009 and was a mentor at the second Nadwa in October 2010.

Amir Tag Elsir is a Sudanese writer, born in 1960. He studied medicine in Egypt and at the British Royal College of Medicine. He has published 14 books, including novels, biographies and poetry. His most important works are: The Dowry of Cries, The Copt’s Worries, The French Perfume and The Crawling of the Ants. His novel The Larvae Hunter was shortlisted for IPAF 2011. Some of his works have been translated into French and three novels are currently being translated into French, English and Italian.

Susannah Tarbush

bqfp to publish sonallah ibrahim's 'beirut, beirut' in english

2011-10-23T10:07:00.004+01:00

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) announced today that it has signed a contract for the English rights to Beirut, Beirut, the 1984 novel by Sonallah Ibrahim (74), a pioneering figure on the Egyptian and Arab literary scenes for around 45 years. Publication of the translation is set for September 2013.

Beirut, Beirut is set during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. "In 1979 Sonallah Ibrahim travelled to Beirut to find a publisher for his novel but found himself in the middle of the conflict," BQFP says. "In an attempt to understand what was happening, Ibrahim began to research and document events, which formed the basis for Beirut, Beirut."

Beirut, Beirut received much critical acclaim on publication in Arabic in 1984 and has been reprinted several times. "Beirut, Beirut is one of a trilogy of documentary novels by Sonallah Ibrahim that employ a literary style unique in Arabic writing", BQFP notes. Ibrahim's other documentary style novels are Zaat (1992) and Warda (2002). And Beirut, Beirut is one of four novels in which the central protagonist is a writer, starting with The Committee (1981).

Several of Ibrahim's novels have been published in English translation including his 1966 debut prison novel The Smell of It (Heinemann African Writers Series, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, 1971); The Committee (American University in Cairo - AUC - Press, trans. Mary St. Germain Charlene Constable, 2001); Zaat (Syracuse University Press, trans. by Anthony Calderbank, 2001); Stealth (Aflame Books, trans Hosam M. Aboul-Ela, 2009).

Sonallah Ibrahim was born in 1937. After studying law and drama at Cairo University, he worked as a journalist until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1959 for his leftist activities. When released in 1964 he moved to Berlin to work for a news agency, and then to Moscow to study cinematography. He returned to Egypt in 1974 and since then has been a full-time writer.In addition to his novels, Ibrahim has written short stories and a dozen children's books. His works have been translated into many languages.

In 1999 he was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2003 he was awarded the Egyptian State’s Arab Novel Award, but rejected the award in public and used the event to deplore the corruption within the Egyptian regime.

In an interview for Jadaliyya conducted by Arabic-English translator and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University Elliott Colla in June this year, Ibrahim speaks about the Egytpian uprising ("not a revolution"), whether there is such a thing as revolutionary literature ("I don't think so"), and about his own writing process.

BQFP,which has its headquarters in Doha, is owned by Qatar Foundation and managed by Bloomsbury Publishing of London. It has built up a impressive list of authors since starting its official launch in April 2010. Its authors include Ibrahim Essa, Khaled Hosseini, Kamila Shamsie, Khaled AlKhamissi, Susan Abulhalwa, Suad Amiry, Abdo Khal, Mohammed Achaari and Ahlam Mostaghanemi. Earlier this month it signed for the English rights to Egyptian author Radwa Ashour's novel Farag to be published in English in February 2013.

BQFP has three stated aims: to publish books of excellence and originality in English and Arabic; to promote the love of reading and writing, including helping establish a vibrant literary culture in Qatar and the Middle East; and to transfer publishing and related skills to Qatar through regular internships and secondments in Doha and at Bloomsbury’s headquarters in London, as well as through training courses in key areas of publishing, and the mentoring of aspiring Qatari publishers.

BQFP has a commitment to helping improve standards of translation into and out of Arabic. It recently held the second annual BQFP International Translation Conference in Doha, in partnership with Carnegie-Mellon University Qatar.

Susannah Tarbush

syrian writer fadi azzam's novel 'sarmada' published in english translation

2011-10-21T23:20:00.016+01:00

Fadi Azzam
against a background of art works by Syrian artist Fadi Yazigi

The publication of Syrian writer and journalist Fadi Azzam’s novel Sarmada in English translation by Adam Talib was celebrated last night at the Mosaic Rooms in central London. The event also marked the launch of the Swallow Editions imprint; the English translation of Sarmada is the new imprint’s first title. The Arabic original of the novel is published by Scientific Arab Publishers of Lebanon. Azzam's first published book was a collection of poems, stories and a piece on Damascus, issued in 2010 by Cairo publisher Merit under the title Thahtaniat, ie Underground.

Swallow Editions says of Azzam's novel: “In Sarmada, three women struggle against the forces of society, family, and passion in a small Druze village in the south of Syria as the country itself struggles against the forces of the Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, and then the Baath.

“The village of Sarmada is an enchanting place, but the people who live there don’t much notice it. To them, the transmigrating souls, potions, soothsayers, and animals in the rocky wasteland are all part of the landscape...Some women risk their lives to follow their hearts and Sarmada is their story.”

Swallow Editions is a sister imprint to London-based Haus Publishing, as is Arabia Books. The Mosaic Rooms event was introduced by Haus’s vivacious founder and publisher Dr Barbara Schwepke.

Swallow Editions is the brainchild of the eminent Syrian novelist Rafik Schami who has lived in Germany for many years and writes in German. Arabia Books published the German -English translations, by Anthea Bell, of his most recent books – The Dark Side of Love and The Calligrapher’s Secret.

Schami has championed Azzam’s writing for a number of years. He says: “With Sarmada, Fadi Azzam proves to us that there are still undiscovered gems in Arabic literature… beautiful writing, long stifled by dictatorship, has just begun to free itself from the grips of censorship. Sarmada and its women dance in front of us with all their senses; they take us by the hand and escort us into their village homes, where the events of this great novel take place.”

Schwepke explained that the seeds of the idea of Swallow Editions first came to Schami when The Dark Side of Love was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. He planned that if he won the prize he would put the money into a pot to help finance the translation of emerging Arab writers into English. At a “conspiratorial lunch” cooked by Schwepke, she and a number of others decided they would take up Schami’s idea whether or not he won the prize (he did not).

Barbara Schwepke

Schwepke explained that through Swallow Editions Rafik Schami will identify and publish emerging Arab voices which are “passionate, powerful and politicised. In other words, they are the voices of the revolution, all these wonderful brave young people – and ‘young’ meaning not necessarily young by age, but in spirit –who have been held back by not sucking up to the dictator or not kissing the hand of the sheikh, or who have fallen foul of censorship.”

She added: “We want to give these emerging writers a voice in English so we can hear them too. And the first of these voices is Fadi Azzam.” She was glad that he could be at the launch “to introduce us to a very passionate novel.”

At the launch Azzam was interviewed by Peter Clark, who was at one time the head of the British Council in Damascus. Azzam and Clark then read sections of the novel, in Arabic and in English translation respectively, before a lively question and answer session.

When Azzam was asked by members of the audience about his next novel and about what young Syrian writers are writing, he said the Syrian revolution has stopped all his projects and that no one can write during this revolution: “We are just reacting. Later we will write about it. For me now Syria is a revolution like any revolution, like the French revolution, like the American Civil war, but the situation will change in all the Middle East. And I believe the Syrian people will win –and I know we need three years for this.”

Schwepke introduced Clark as “a doyen of translation and of cultural bridge building.” She added that Clark is one of her authors at Haus Publishing, which will publish his forthcoming book Dickens’s London in April 2012.

It turned out that Azzam shares Clark’s love of Dickens. Azzam has been based in Dubai for the past decade (he arrived in the UAE after the failed Syria Spring of 2001), but in 2005 he came to Britain on a visit that turned out to mark a breakthrough in his writing career. He financed the trip through “loans on about ten credit cards from the bank”, went to the British Council and asked them to recommend one of the towns where Dickens had lived. “They choose for me Broadstairs, between Margate and Ramsgate” on the Kent coast of south-east England.

In Broadstairs, where he stayed for some 100 days, Azzam visited Dickens’s house. He also attended the Charles Dickens festival during which people dress up in the streets as characters from the novels of Dickens. It was at around this time that he started writing articles for two websites: Oxygen, and Damascus Motherfucker. Rafik Schami contacted him, full of praise for an article on Damascus published online and in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Azzam became a regular contributor to the newspaper. He wrote 252 articles in three years for Al-Quds al-Arabi and says this was good writing practice and discipline for when he came to write Sarmada.

Asked about his literary influences, Azzam singled out the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani (born 1936, assassinated Beirut 1972). He had read Kanafani “like crazy: I think until now he is for me the best writer around the Arab world.” He also named the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Saudi novelist Abdul Rahman Munif (who lived in Syria for many years and died there in 2004), the late Syrian playwright Saaddallah Wannous, and several Syrians from Azzam’s generation.

The author had a beguiling way about him as he discussed with Peter Clark his life and work from his childhood in the small village of Taara near the city of Sweida in southern Syria where he was born in 1973. The village did not have electricity until he was seven years old, and he remembered his wonderment when a refrigerator, TV and washing machine first arrived.

School was for him like a “punishment” and he dropped out at the age of 15 and ”started to rock and roll”, listening to Michael Jackson on cassette and doing things forbidden at school such as growing his hair long. But at 18 he returned to education because if a young man of that age was not at school or university he had to enter the army. When he moved to Damascus to attend university, “everything changed in my life. Damascus gives every person something in his passion, in his dream. In Sweida you are just Druze, in Damascus you are Syrian. I was 10 years in Damascus, in 25 homes in each area of Damascus – I know it stone by stone, road by road. I’m from Sweida but Damascus made me. It gave me everything.”

But despite the importance of Damascus to Azzam, it was to the land of his native Sweida that he was drawn for his first novel Sarmada. Peter Clark said that while the novel has different generations and different people, and a fantasy world and a real world, “it is the place that is essential”. Fadi said: “The secret is, the place is my hero...This place is full of power and magic, and it’s like virgin land – not a lot of people know about it. I think this place has thousands of stories.” He recalled also the characteristic hard black stones of the land (the terrain of southern Syria is particularly known for its black volcanic rock).

The rural setting of Sarmada is reflected in its language. Translator Adam Taleb was sitting in the audience, and Clark congratulated him on his translation, and asked him about the process. “It was a challenge – Fadi uses a lot of village vocabulary,” Talib said. “We’ve had probably 30 to 40 e-mails and conversations, so he helped me through.”

Clark said one of the things he found most interesting in the novel was that while the three central women characters over the generations may accept their destiny, yet they have some control of their destiny also and make decisions over their environment.

Clark found the sole central male character Bukhair (who he thinks has some similarities with Azzam) has the voice of the new emerging generation of Arab writers, such as the Beirut39 group of 39 Arab authors aged 39 or less, “who are your age or younger, and are quite different I think from the previous generation.”

Peter Clark

Azzam told Clark that he is from a generation between the older, “loser generation” that has lost out in politics and everything else and is “finished”, and “the generation coming after us”. He said: “We are in between and no one has mentioned us actually.”

Azzam highlighted the difficulties he had faced in getting his first book published, difficulties shared by the new generation of Arab writers more generally. At least he had had some clout through being in Dubai and having at least some money: he asked what about those who don't have such advantages. There is a neglect of writers from countries such as Somalia, Mauritania and Syria where there are "a lot of creative people" who receive no attention and are marginalised. "I read a Somali writer and it is amazing – a new unknown voice full of power and love... we should know about these voices."

Some members of the audience who had read Sarmada were particularly struck by Azzam’s writing from the perspective of women. One woman said to Azzam: “I really loved the book. I found it haunting, beautiful in places. I think that you write about female sexuality in a way that I’ve rarely come across before: how as a man do you do that?”

Azzam said that in the village, which is more open than the city, “it’s a normal thing to know the women and the girls better than the others. In Syria we are playing together with the girls in the nature, and we know everything in nature. I am in communication with women more than the city guys. In the village you see animals make sex, and see nature make love in front of you. You have your neighbour’s girl and discover the world with her. “ He said that when he writes as a woman, “I am woman in that moment, yes I feel it. And also my atmosphere is women. I have a lot of aunts and it is easy to know the female things.”

Susannah Tarbush

three 'arab spring' egyptian writers tour england

2011-10-17T09:13:00.009+01:00

'BQFP brings the Arab Spring to the UK'. This is the slogan under which Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP ) is promoting the current tour of England by three Egyptian authors of novels newly published in English translation: Ahmed Khaled Towfik (author of Utopia), Ahmed Mourad (Vertigo) and Khaled Alkhamissi (Taxi).

The Arab Spring may be running into difficulties on the ground, and the phrase may have been somwhat over-used, but it remains a useful shorthand that has the potency to raise pulse rates in the literary and publishing spheres. 'Arab Spring' authors tend to be seen as decidedly cool. And 'Arab Spring literature' includes works written not only during the Arab Uprising, but also literature which - as in the case of these three novels - somehow presaged it.

As BQFP puts it: "All three titles provide an insight into life under Mubarak; the corruption, mayhem and daily grind of everyday life in Egypt, as well as its comic side. With parliamentary elections due to take place on 21st November 2011 Egypt continues to make the headlines and these bestselling authors are three voices from the eye of the storm." With publication of the novels BQFP has "added three outstanding titles to its list of fiction translated from Arabic, introducing bestselling Egyptian authors to a new English readership."

The 15-23 October tour ranges widely over England, taking in the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Southbank Centre and the Egyptian Embassy in London, Bristol Festival of Ideas, Durham Book Festival, and Cambridge University (details are below).

Ahmed Khaled Towfik

Ahmed Khaled Towfik, born in 1962, is regarded as the Arab world’s most prominent and bestselling author of fantasy and horror genres and is the author of more than 200 books. Utopia (first published in Arabic in 2009 by Dar Merit in Cairo; now translated into English by Chip Rossetti) is a vision of Egyptian society in the year 2023. "It is a chilling dystopian journey beyond the gated communities of the North Coast where the wealthy are insulated from the extreme poverty outside the walls. In a time when the world is guessing what the future will hold for Egypt, Utopia portrays a grim scenario."
A review by Sholto Byrnes in the Independent said: "Utterly compelling… Far more convincing a depiction of a nightmarish future even than A Clockwork Orange [by Anthony Burgess], Utopia is a miniature masterpiece. I defy anyone not to read it in one sitting."

Khaled Alkhamissi

Khaled AlKhamissi, born in 1962, is in addition to being a novelist a TV producer, and former publisher. He is chairman and CEO of Nile for Cultural and Media Production.
An English translation by Jonathan Wright of his 2006 novel Taxi (published in Arabic by Dar El Shorouk) was published by the small (now unfortunately defunct) UK publisher Aflame Books in 2008. The "new and improved English translation by Wright includes a post-revolution introduction by the author and has been described as ‘the ultimate book on the Egyptian Revolution’ (by Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany)," BQFP observes. "Taxi transports the reader to the Cairo streets in this bestselling collection of colourful encounters with taxi drivers during the final years of the Mubarak era. The fifty-eight fictional monologues tell Herculean tales of the struggle for survival and dignity among Greater Cairo’s 80,000 cab drivers."
The Independent's literary editor Boyd Tonkin finds that Wright's translation catches the taxi drivers' "raucous, ribald, but also tender and melancholic, drift. Money, love, family, politics, and the sheer surreal mayhem of the daily grind under Mubarak's regime, drive this invigorating panorama of a city, and a country, stuck in an endless tailback. Prior to Egypt's revolution, Taxi would have told you more than a thousand Twitter feeds about what was coming down the road beside the Nile."

Ahmed Mourad

Ahmed Mourad, born 1978, is a photographer, graphic designer and novelist, and has won several awards for his short films. His debut novel Vertigo (translated by Robin Moger; first published in Arabic in 2007 by Dar Merit) is "a bestselling political thriller that exposes Cairo’s seedy nightlife. Ahmed, a society photographer in a celebrated nightclub, witnesses a friend horrifically killed in a fight between business rivals. When the photographer is forced to flee the scene of the crime he subsequently becomes ensnared in a web of crimes whose perpetrators stop at nothing to cover up." In its original Arabic the novel was reprinted seven times. Egypt's The Daily News described it as "a beautiful and exciting novel".

Tour Venues:

On 15 October Khaled Alkhamissi made two appearances at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. First, he participated in the Prospect Debate on The New Protest Movement, with Martin Bell, Shiv Malik, and Prospect editor Bronwen Maddox. And then he and Tarek Osman (author of Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak, Yale University Press) discussed 'The Arab Uprising - Where Next?' with Julia Wheeler in the chair.

Tonight, 17 October, the three authors are at the Egyptian Embassy in London for a reception, and a discussion on Egyptian literature moderated by BQFP consultant publisher Andy Smart.

Tomorrow 18 October 7.30-9 pm the writers are at the Bristol Festival of Ideas for 'Egypt and the Uprising' chaired by Sarah Lefanu.

Wednesday 19 October sees the trio at Keynes Hall, Kings College, Cambridge University for 'In the Eye of the Storm: Life and Writing in Contemporary Egypt' chaired by Professor Yasir Suleiman, Cambridge University's Head of Arabic.

On Thursday 20 October 7.45pm at London's Southbank Centre the authors will discuss their work and "offer fascinating insights ino a country at the heart of geopolitical events in 2011". In the chair is Paul Blezard.

The finale of the tour on Sunday 22 October is at 11 am at the Durham Book Festival in the north of England. The authors will "discuss contemporary Egyptian writing and publishing, and reflect on what the Arab Spring will mean for writers from the Middle East."

Susannah Tarbush

interview with Libyan writer Mohamed Mesrati

2011-10-15T11:25:00.023+01:00

An interview with the Libyan writer Mohamed Mesrati
"The only thing I’m in life for is to be a writer."

Mesrati at the London Book Fair seminar 'The Hidden Face of Libyan Fiction'

Around five years ago the London-based Iraqi writer and journalist Samuel Shimon – founder of the Arabic literary website Kikah.com and cofounder of Banipal magazine – received by e-mail a short story from a then unknown Libyan writer named Mohamed Mesrati living in the northern English city of Manchester

Shimon found Mesrati’s short story “fantastic”, and had no hesitation in publishing it in a prominent position on Kikah. He asked Mesrati to send him more stories, and said he might arrange for some to be translated into English and published in Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature of which Shimon is now editor.

Shimon also asked Mesrati to send him a photograph of himself, and recalls his astonishment when a picture of “a young boy” arrived. He asked Mesrati how old he was: “Sixteen” came the answer.

Mesrati, who turned 21 in July, has amply lived up to this early promise. He has had a succession of stories published in Kikah and an array of other online publications and websites, in al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, and on his own blog Merciapide. Shimon praises both the story-telling skills and style of Misrati’s “really beautiful short stories”. And unlike those of some other Arab writers, Mesrati’s stories need virtually no editing when submitted for publication. Shimon thinks Mesrati has benefitted from his wide reading, including of English-language writers, and other writers in English translation.

The prominent Libyan short-story writer and translator Omar al-Kikli names Mesrati as one of the nine Libyan short-story writers “who have gained most prominence in the first decade of the new century”. Al-Kikli made his comment in an essay on the Libyan short story, published in Banipal’s first-ever special feature on Libyan fiction – published, fortuitously, not long after the Libyan uprising erupted in mid-February.

The 135-page special feature includes an excerpt from Mesrati’s novel-in-progress Mama Pizza, translated into English by Leri Price. Rich in comic touches, the novel has an 18-year-old first-person narrator and is set among Libyan fast-food workers and menu deliverers in the town of Runcorn, near the north-west English port of Liverpool. The excerpt features a Libyan leftist “pizza-making veteran and professional menu deliverer” named Ali Guevara.

Mesrati’s novel enters new territory for Anglo-Libyan and Anglo-Arab fiction: that of Libyan and other Arab refugees and workers struggling to get by in a northern English town, seen from the perspective of a teenage Libyan worker.

Mesrati is a writer from the Arab Spring’s Facebook Generation we hear so much about, eager and restless for change. He is an engaging, funny, outspoken character, playful and erudite. His Twitter profile reads: ‘Writer, journalist, blogger, and REBEL!’ His tweets have recently included irreverent observations on the new political players in Libya.

Mesrati has had a high profile as a writer during the Libyan revolution. He is one of four Libyan fiction writers based in the UK who have been much in demand for conferences, broadcasts, interviews and articles. They were the panellists at the London Book Fair’s groundbreaking ‘The Hidden Face of Libyan Fiction’ seminars in April. The other three writers are prizewinning novelist Hisham Matar, the short-story writer Giuma Bukleb (born in 1952 and imprisoned with other writers in Libya for ten years from the late 1970s), and the short-story writer, surgeon, essayist and prizewinning blogger and podcaster Ghazi Gheblawi.

with Samuel Shimon at the London Book Fair seminar

Is it possible to sum up how the past eight months have been for you, as a Libyan and as a writer? Did you think the revolution would turn out the way it has?
It has been a strange eight months. From the beginning of the uprising in Tunisia, followed by the Egyptian uprising, and then the Libyan, I was all the time wondering if Libyans would make it one day and bring Gaddafi down. I had a big question mark in my mind as did most Libyan intellectuals. I was following many Libyans who were writing and preparing for February 17th as the day of the Libyan revolution, and I was wondering how it would be.

In fact, Libya is not Egypt, nor Tunisia; Gaddafi killed our history and our identity - our flag, street names, national anthem. That was horrible, but it was amazing when we finally saw the independence flag waving over Benghazi in the protests. When I was at school we were taught that our history started from 1969, that we just had Italian colonisation and then Gaddafi came in 1969. Before I came to Britain in 2005, I didn’t know that there had been a kingdom of Libya. And it was only then that I saw our old flag of independence, on opposition websites.

From the beginning of the revolution, we knew that one day Gaddafi and his regime would be a memory – a bad one –from the past. We knew it would take a long time - to be honest, six months is a very short time to bring down a regime that was deeply embedded inside the country, but we are proud to have brought down the whole regime and not only the president. Libyans have reclaimed their identity and everything they lost since Gaddafi took power, and what did we discover in the end? That Gaddafi’s regime was Muhawala Inqilab Fashela – ie A Failed Coup Attempt.

Have you been able to find time for writing during this period?
During the revolution I wrote a lot of essays and fiction. I wrote an essay for an anthology which will soon come out in English entitled Alsh’ab Yurid – The People Demand – and an article for the Lebanese magazine Kalamon. I also wrote short stories that I published mainly on my blog. Most of the short stories I wrote during the revolution are about dictatorship. I wrote and posted a story, entitled Rats in the Big Brother’s Alley about Gaddafi’s 22 February speech, and his phrase Zanga Zanga (alley by alley). Another story, The Origin of Dictatorship, is a fantasy about the night that Gaddafi’s dad slept with Gaddafi’s mum, and the sperm that made Muammar Gaddafi. In the story I ask what if Gaddafi’s mother hadn’t wanted to have sex that night, what would have happened to the sperm that Gaddafi came from? Maybe his dad would have lost it somewhere in the desert!

How do you think the revolution will influence the future path of Libyan literature and Libya’s literary life in general? How do you see the prospects for Libyan artistic and creative life, and what do you hope for?
In Benghazi, just eight months after its liberation, we see more than 100 newspapers and magazines coming out. The same thing will happen in Tripoli and Misrata, but it is still too early to talk about literary magazines. I have a positive vision of Libya’s literary and cultural future. I believe that people were suffering to build a literary community, and now, here you go, you have the space to fill and you have the ideas and the materials – so go for it and do your project. There are literary cafes already in Tripoli as well as in Benghazi, and I can see intellectuals standing up again to improve the culture situation. On the other hand, I have my own vision of the Tripolitan literary side. I hope to see a real theatre and culture centres, like London’s South Bank Centre, full of events, creative works and the warm blood of creation. I’m asking to have festivals in cinema, art and books. And can you imagine that we don’t have a cinema industry to make films in Libya? It’s bloody ridiculous in a country that is rich in stories and history that could easily be turned into scripts for the big screen.

Are you planning to go back to Libya soon, at least for a visit? And do you see your long-term future as being there, or here in the UK, or where?
No, it’s still early for me to go even though I’m dying to go there and see my family and friends. Some friends and family members fought during the uprising, and a number of them were killed. Some are still missing. After we left Libya in 2005 and claimed political asylum in Britain my family and I couldn’t go back, because of Gaddafi – we were against the regime. Our asylum claim was at first rejected, and we had to appeal in court – but we had the evidence to back it up. Now that Libya is free, people are going back and some of them already started making projects in media and culture - but I still feel it is too hard to go back. I am basically not ready yet to see Libya without my childhood friends. I’m not ready to see the land that never left my mind since I left it. I built somehow a romantic image of Libya in my mind, and I’m sure that I still need time before I go there and destroy this image by the reality. In the future, I see myself still in Europe, maybe still in London, but if not you will probably find me somewhere between Naples and Rome – two of my most favourite cities in the world.

How do you think the revolution may influence your own writing?
Oh hell, it will change my writing in every way. The revolution depended on people, some of whom I personally know, joining the revolution and holding weapons, and I already feel that the big amount of harm and stress we got from this revolution changed my writing. I can’t tell how, but I can feel there is something strange going on whenever I write. I have planned two novels on the liberation war of Libya and all I need is time to write them. One of the novels has five characters, each with a story from different places, meeting up in Misrata. It will try to show all aspects of the revolution, including a female perspective and a Gaddafi soldier’s point of view. The other novel is a bit personal, about me and my friends inside Libya.

Please say something about your trip to post-revolution Egypt. I understand you were hoping to get into Libya from there, but were turned back.
I promised myself to keep this trip away from any conversation or interview until I publish a book about it. It’s longer than any interview can hold … it basically changed my life 100%.. Before Egypt I was one person, and after it I turned into someone else.

I think you were working in a bookshop, but gave up your job when you went to Egypt.
I left my job at one of the Fergiani book company’s three London bookshops –Queens Park Books – when I went to Egypt. I am now working in journalism as a freelancer and I recently started working part-time in the bookshop again. The customers ask me about Libya, and about my family, and sometimes invite me out for a drink or wave to me through the shop window. I feel very close to home in that environment, and in Queen’s Park – where I used to live.

Queens Park Books

Where were you born?
I was born in Tripoli in July 1990. My family is originally from Misrata but my father and then I were born in Tripoli. My dad was born in Fashloum. I was born in a street whose name was changed every time the regime changed: the Italian colonialists called it Via Italia. After independence it was called December 24th (the date of Libyan independence) Street, and when Gaddafi took power on September 1st 1969 he called it September 1st Street. Now, after the fall of Gaddafi, suddenly people started to call it February 17th Street. The conclusion is that I was born in a street that lost its identity, the same as me.

Were your parents involved in the arts?
My father is a play actor and was in many international plays but he focused on the subject of freedom, like any young revolutionary in the 70s and 80s. He learnt much from Moroccan theatre and developed what they called ‘The Suffering Theatre’ and ‘The Poor Theatre’ and then ‘The Free Theatre’. They were making plays from their own money. They had a challenging approach and were trying to make a new kind of theatre, but as you know, under military control nothing like that could really happen. For example, in 1984 my father acted an international play, Dracula, and they came and arrested him at night because, they said, “you mean Gaddafi is like Dracula”!
My mother is a musician and journalist. She plays oud and piano, but she found herself in journalism – especially after she came to England, where she could breathe freedom and could write freely about the regime in Libya.

Have you done any acting yourself? – you seem to enjoy playing with different images and so on.
I acted in plays when I was at school, and before I decided to be a writer I dreamed of being an actor. When my dad went out in the evenings, back in Tripoli, I would look through his shelves and read old scripts of plays or series he acted in – I used to read them out loud. Even now I’ll stand in front of a mirror and change my style and act things. Sometimes I sit by myself thinking about a story I would like to write, or a novel, and when I am planning it I choose a scene and start to act it before writing it down. Who knows, maybe one day I will be an actor!

During the London Book Fair Libyan fiction seminar you vividly described the northern English town of Runcorn, near Liverpool, where your novel Mama Pizza is set. How come you went to live there and where else have you lived in Britain?
I lived in Runcorn for a while. I went there because it was summer and I needed to work and get money. It’s a nice small town, and in the old town there are many pizza and kebab shops - I used to work in one of ‘em. That’s the place I chose to write my novel about. It’s a fascinating place and I met many different Libyans there with very interesting stories that I thought it would be enjoyable to share. I think British culture and literature need to know more about this side of Britain. For example, have you ever seen a kebab and pizza shop menu in your post box and thought about the person who delivered it? Who knows, he could be me, because I was a menu distributor for more than two years of my life, in Runcorn, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester. I would put headphones on, listen to music and go from house to house posting menus and dreaming of being a writer one day – and not only a writer, but an international writer. I imagined writing MY Ulysses and I would calm myself down every time a racist person came out of his/her house, shouting at me to go back to my country, by imagining that that this person would one day read my books and would love them. Moreover, kebab and pizza shops are now a part of the British society and as a writer who worked in them I need to write about them.

I lived in Manchester between my parents’ house and my girlfriend’s studio until I turned 18, then I moved to London, it was 2009. I moved to London just to have more freedom and torture myself, like many great poets and writers did ages ago, so that I could then write good literature!

Runcorn Old Town

Is your novel autobiographical?
Mama Pizza draws a lot on my time working in Runcorn as a pizza maker and menu distributor. I had many troubles there. I faced racism, cultural misunderstanding, I found myself in a small Libya! I saw how people treated me badly when I was posting advertising leaflets to their houses and I was sure that these people didn’t know that I was human and had dreams, and would like to have a fine house and family like they did. This is what I talk about in the novel. I also try to show another face of England, a side that people are always facing but never think to go deep inside, either in fiction or in the media. It’s the weird life of a pizza and kebab maker.

What role did literature play in your life when you were younger?
Literature meant a lot to me from when I was a boy and trying to be an actor. I loved plays so much, and my dad’s library was full of them, and I didn’t read anything else. In the days when I was reading plays, I liked Syrian author Saadallah Wannous and Moroccan playwrights such as Mohamed Elmeskin and Elmeskini Alsagher. However I became passionate about literature in general when I watched an Arab TV series called An End of a Brave Man and read that it had been taken from a novel of the same title by the Syrian novelist Hanna Minah. I went to Fergiani Bookshop in Tripoli and bought it - I remember I was 11 or 12 at the time - and when I read that novel I said that I definitely wanted to be a novelist. I continued to read Hanna Minah for a long time until I started reading Naguib Mahfouz and so on. I remember going to small bookshops and I remember one owned by an old man where all the books were dusty because no one went there. The owner supported my interest in literature and he used to let me borrow books, as long as I took them back. My grandfather -my mother’s father - had a very big library. His brother was a well-known writer and judge, Mohamed Kamel al-Houni. He had many books, and gave his library to my grandfather. My grandfather encouraged me to be a writer.

When did you start writing fiction?
I started writing stories when I was around 12. I used to write short stories at home – my mum would see me writing in the afternoon and think I was doing school homework. The short-story writer Ali Mustafa a-Musrati [born in 1926] used to walk in the street in Tripoli – everyone would recognise him. When I was 13 years old I went up to him, gave him some of my writing and said “here’s a story”. He said “I’ll read it and come back to you.” About a week later I went to his house at 2 pm and rang the bell and his daughter said he wasn’t at home. I waited until 5 pm and rang the bell again and his daughter said she had forgotten that he had gone to Tunisia. A few days later he recognised me in the street and told me: “You story was very good, but it is not ready to be published.” He gave me a signed copy of his new collection: he was the first author ever to sign one of his books for me. I read most of his stories when I was young.

How did your writing develop after you came as a refugee to Britain?
I came to England when I was 14 years and 10 months and went to North Manchester High School for Boys. All the time I was at school in Libya I was in mixed sex schools, and I thought in Britain schools were mixed, so was surprised to find myself in a boys-only school. I then went to the Manchester College where I did more GCSEs and some media studies. I started reading deeply and wrote my first stories in Manchester Central Library, which happens to be where Hilary Mantel wrote her first novel. The first story I sent Samuel Shimon for Kikah was called Asafeer Sharesa, meaning Fierce Birds – it’s about two brothers trying to kill their uncle and grandmother. I was 16 at that time. I had other stories published on Kikah, and two stories and a couple of articles published in Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. But like most of the writers I know of my generation much of my work was first published on blogs and websites; my generation’s writers only write for newspapers to get money. I have published often on the websites jeel-libya.net and libya-watanona.com –Ibrahim Ighneiwa’s website – and also on Libya Today at libya-alyoum.com

Considering all the work you have had published online, is publication in book form still important to you?
For me, the only thing I’m in life for is to be a writer. And no one can consider himself to be a writer until he has had a book published.

What happened with your first collection of short stories, which you had prepared for publication?
My experience of trying to have my first collection of 15 short stories published is a long saga that will stress me out if I remember it here. I gave up with it after realising that publishing in Arabic is killing creativity. Publishing houses in the Arab World are one of the biggest problems in destroying the meaning of reading. There are no rights for the author, and we young writers have to pay money to have our writing published. Normally the publisher looks at your wallet rather than at your work.

Banipal’s special feature on Libyan fiction l has an excerpt from your novel-in-progress Mama Pizza in English translation. How far is the novel autobiographical, and when do you expect it to be completed? Is it your first novel?
Mama Pizza is not my first novel. I finished my first novel a year ago – I wrote it in 2006-2010 – but I hate it. I like to make tragedy funny in my writing, but this novel was only tragic. It covers three generations of Libyan history, through a grandfather, father and son. It’s short, at 35,000 words. Mama Pizza will be completed and ready for publication, first in Arabic, in summer 2012. I have put something autobiographical in all my writing. I believe that any author should have something autobiographical in any writing he or she does.
By the way, that Banipal special feature on Libyan Fiction was long overdue: we had been waiting for it for more than 7 years! And when Banipal Books published an anthology of short stories from North Africa, Sardines and Oranges, in 2005, it didn’t include a single story from Libya among its 26 stories.

What form of Arabic do you use in Mama Pizza?
As well as its Libyan characters, the novel has two Algerian and four Syrian characters, and the Arabic text of Mama Pizza includes Libyan, Algerian and Syrian dialects I use informal Libyan in the dialogue. I believe authors from other countries translated into English should use some of their own language phrases in the translation. This shows the culture they are talking about and make the text more easily envisioned. Mama Pizza and other fiction work that I will write will be dressed by the Tripolitan and Libyan dialect in general, especially given that Tripolitan Arabic is a mixture of Arabic and Italian, which makes conversations and dialogues rich.

Will Gaddafi’s departure and the new situation in Libya make any difference to the writing of Mama Pizza?
I never hid my hatred of Gaddafi and I have written about him in many of my previous works. Most of the characters in Mama Pizza left Libya and went to Runcorn just because of Gaddafi’s regime. I have already made the plan for the novel, and I don’t think his end will change anything in it. It’s already an anti-Gaddafi novel, most of my writing even before the 2011 revolution was anti-Gaddafi.

Do you have a particular writing routine?
I used to write daily in the train travelling between Leyton, in East London, and my work at the Queens Park bookshop. The journey took an hour. Now I can’t write every day, but some days I write from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon while listening to jazz.

Do you do much rewriting?
I rewrite a lot, I wrote some chapters of Mama Pizza three or four times, and then I compare and see what’s the best and what to add and cut. I do this before showing my work to anyone, and more editing comes up after showing my writing to friends or to my agent, Nemonie.

When do you think will Mama Pizza may be published in English?
I’m not sure when the novel will be published in English, but I believe it will be important for the British reader to have it and read about people he sees almost everyday!

The excerpt in Banipal was translated by Leri Price. Are you continuing to work with her, eg is she translating the whole novel?
Leri Price did a good translation but unfortunately I don’t have any contact with her and my agent found a good translator, Robin Moger. He has previously translated one of my non-fiction works and I thought, as did my agent, that he would be a good translator for Mama Pizza.

What have you been reading during your time in England?
When I came to England I read mostly Arabic, especially classical poetry. I went on to read in English, and I started reading British and American literature and literature translated into English from French and other languages. Now I’m reading many different books at the same time. I’m not really in a mood to read on one book at a time. I reread quite a bit nowadays, books including Kitab al-Tugra (Book of the Sultan’s Seal) by Egyptian Yousef Rakha and The Savage Detectives by Chilean Roberto Bolano. I read in English a lot of literature which has never been translated into Arabic, and a lot of post-modern literature. Roberto Bolano is one of my favourites, and he has not been translated into Arabic.
I also reread Matahat - Autobiography - by Libyan author Kamel Hassan Maghur. In fact I love this book, it talks about the biography of the author by telling the stories of his friends and neighbours in Tripoli during the 50s and 60s. I’m fascinated with this period of Libyan history.

a favourite book

Tell us something about your blog and about the Imtidad cultural podcasts which you co-produce and co-host with Ghazi Gheblaw. When did you first meet him, and what sort of subjects do the two o f you cover?
I started my blog under the title ‘My Camomile Tea’ in December 2009 – I have since changed its name to ‘Merciapide’, meaning Sidewalk . My posts focus on culture and literature, and include reviews of books, cinema and music - subjects on which the Imtidad podcasts also focus. I got to know Ghazi’s writing when I read his first published short-story collection when I was still in Libya, and then I met him in person in December 2007 after I came to Britain.
Ghazi and I select topics from our experiences –for example a recent film we have watched or books we have both read. We have put a huge amount of work into developing Imtidad. Ghazi spent a lot to make a small professional studio and we also pay the rights for the songs we choose for the episodes. We have tried to work to very professional and high standards, and have succeeded. We need more comments and other support to help us improve the show by introducing new subjects and involving more people. We plan to make the project bigger in the near future. We still have hope.

How important is the internet for you and other Libyan writers?
Hell, without the internet there wouldn’t even have been a revolution in Libya. It’s difficult to answer this question; I’ve never been in a situation to ask myself how life could be without the internet as a Libyan writer, it’s like a writer without a pen. But it made publishing much easier than before.

You have been doing a creative writing course at London University’s Birkbeck College. Do you think creative writing courses are a real help to writers, especially those starting out?
I am studying creative writing and culture at Birkbeck, and will be changing my subjects to journalism and media next academic year, starting autumn 2012. It was a challenge to study creative writing, but so far I have not found an undergraduate course in creative writing to be a good way to improve your writing. An author, especially a young author, needs to have freedom in writing and in making a new style in writing. A young author should experiment in many ways and feel free to write, but a course or degree in creative writing may limit a young author’s creativity and put him or her on a professional path that will hamper the creative. A creative writing course is best suited to a professional writer who has already discovered their style and who reads a lot.

It is sometimes said that it is almost more difficult for a writer to get taken on by a literary agent than by a publisher. You have been taken by an agent at a distinguished literary agency whose clients include Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Len Deighton and the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. How did you and your agent get to know about each other and what are you jointly hoping for in terms of writing and publication?
My manager in the bookshop where I was working introduced my agent Nemonie Craven Roderick –a director of Jonathan Clowes Agency – to me in March this year. We exchanged a couple of emails, and she read some of my short stories in English translation, and the Mama Pizza extract in Banipal, before we met for the first time during the London Book Fair at the Libyan fiction seminar. As a first assignment for her I wrote an essay about the Libyan revolution and the struggling of Libyans for the last forty-two years. I believe she liked the essay, and we signed a contract. We in fact hope to introduce a new kind of fiction and novels, but the most important thing is that both of us believe in my work. She is an amazing agent, and we have worked very well together so far. We are even good friends now. Nemonie will be handling publication rights for the Arabic edition of Mama Pizza, as well as of the English translation. Hopefully I will continue working with her for the rest of my novels.

Waguih Ghali's novel

When did your fascination with the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali start? You have said you identify with him in some ways.
I heard about Waguih Ghali for the first time in the middle of last year from my friend Ghazi Gheblawi who watched the programme on Ghali’s editor Diana Athill in the BBC’s Imagine series. Later, in autumn 2010, I heard his name again from various writers from the Middle-East who write in English and I started Googling him and bought Athill’s memoir of him, After a Funeral. Later still in 2010 when his novel was republished by Serpent’s Tail and I read it for the first time I was sure that I should have been the person who wrote Beer in the Snooker Club! Waguih’s personality in Diana’s book, and even in Beer in the Snooker Club, has a lot of similarities with me. All my life in Libya, for example, I tried to pretend that I was as rich as my cousins who were living in good areas of Tripoli and wearing fine clothes, studying abroad and speaking foreign languages. At the same time I was closer to the poor people in the area where I used to live. I cared about myself and what I looked like. I was a rebel against traditions, family life, society and God’s dictatorship. Also I was well read and I had many troubles because of my cousin who seems to be like Munir in Beer in the Snooker Club. I believe Waguih and I have a similar sense of humour.
For all these reasons and more, I started thinking of writing a biography of Waguih. His life still has many unknowns, especially his time in Egypt. I have often asked myself whether he still has family in Cairo, who they are, and whether they knew him. Moreover, when I visited Cairo a few months ago, I went to Groppi and after a tea there (they stopped serving the fine whiskey Ghali writes about!) I had a long walk to Zamalek as described by Waguih in his novel. I put my hands in my pockets and walked along the Nile, imagining the buildings and streets as they were in the 1940s and 50s. “Nothing changed” I told myself when I arrived in Zamalek, “Only people changed”.

Are you planning to write a memoir?
A memoir! Hmm, I think it’s still early to think about writing a memoir, but most of my essays are autobiography.

It seems that until the uprising in Libya – with the massing of Libyan demonstrators from Manchester and other cities outside the Libyan embassy in London – few Britons realised how large the Libyan community in Britain is. Is this your impression?
There are a lot of Libyans in England, especially in the north. There are more than 20,000 Libyans in the UK I believe. Some of them are students, and there is a small community of Libyan Jews, but the majority are asylum seekers, the same as me. Most Libyans here used to hide their nationality for one reason: if a Libyan said he or she is from Libya, the only image that came to the mind of the person they were taking to was that of Muammar Gaddafi – or they might not even know where this bloody Libya was. Some of my friends used to say they were from Lebanon, not even from Libya. Now, after the February 17th revolution, the image has started to change. In Manchester I saw cars of Libyans with the independence flag waving on ‘em, and sweet and sexy Libyan girls wearing clothes in the colours of the flag. I have seen someone in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens screaming ‘I’m Libyan, I’m Libyan and proud’. It was an emotional moment, until I fell down on my knees laughing when I heard a homeless person crossing the garden saying: “Then go back to your country!”

Do you see yourself as, say, a Libyan émigré writer, or an Anglo-Libyan writer?
I believe that I am an immigrant writer, lost in identity between Britain and Libya. I believe both countries are like two ladies who hate me and I am still keeping the secret relation between me and them. They hate me but I need to stay with them.

interview conducted by Susannah Tarbush

launch & review of jad el hage's novel 'one day in april'

2011-10-13T19:19:00.004+01:00

The Lebanese writer and journalist Jad El Hage’s latest novel One Day in April was launched at the Mosaic Rooms in central London, at the invitation of El Hage’s legendary octogenarian Palestinian publisher Naim Attallah, chairman of Quartet Books. The evening event included a book signing and a reception with drinks and Arab snacks.

Attallah [pictured above] presides over one of the few remaining independent London publishers, and takes a hands-on approach to the selection of titles. “I met Jad only through the telephone – we were talking for about the last six or eight months and we became friends; yesterday was the first time I met him face to face,” he said. “When I got the manuscript I read it over the weekend and thought it was marvellous. So I rang him the next day and said ‘we’re going to publish it’. And everyone else at Quartet loved it. He came all the way from Lebanon to attend this launch – so please I urge you buy many copies, give it to all your friends! Pass the good word because he deserves it.”

The guest speaker was Jihad el-Khazen [pictured below], the distinguished Al-Hayat newspaper journalist, columnist and former editor-in-chief. There were readings from the novel by El Hage and by Lebanese actress Valerie Sarruf, a one- time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

El-Hage has worked for two decades at Al-Hayat, first in London and then in Lebanon, and el-Khazen hailed him as a colleague and as a friend. El-Khazen said reading the novel was for him “a trip down memory lane: there were things that I remembered from my life in Lebanon during the civil war on every page.”

El-Khazen recounted a number of anecdotes from his days as a journalist in Lebanon. He noted that the newspaper for which the book’s first person narrator, Armenian photo-journalist Koko Krikorian, works is the Daily Sun, while “I was editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, the only English-language newspaper in Lebanon.” He paid tribute to the prominent role played by Armenians in news photography in Lebanon.

The book is set on 13 April 1977 and is divided into two halves, Morning and Afternoon, plus an Epilogue. The afternoon section is set in the wilds of the Bekaa Valley where Koko Krikorian goes to team up with with his former friend but now enemy Nader Abi Nader for a journalistic assignment. The two had fallen out after Nader stole Koko’s great love, the painter Najla Helou.

El Hage writes well of love, friendship and fatherhood, and the passage he chose to read at the launch told of how during his time in the Bekaa Koko misses his Armenian wife Arsiné and his baby son, who that morning took his first steps.

Jad El Hage and Valerie Sarruf

El-Khazen said Najla and Nader “come across in the book as unreliable and spaced out, and I think they deserve each other.” El-Khazen found the book’s second part with its wedding and a blood feuds, particularly interesting. He spoke of visiting the Bekaaa, “one area of Lebanon with which I am very familiar”, and of the valley’s code of honour and revenge killings among the clans. El Hage’s description of the Bekka is lively “and anyone who doesn’t know the area will find something to make them continue reading .”

Review of One Day in April from Banipal issue 42

Lebanese author and journalist Jad El Hage’s new novel completes what his publisher terms his “informal civil war trilogy.” The trilogy began with The Last Migration (Panache Publications, 2002), exploring the Lebanese émigré experience in 1990s London. Next came The Myrtle Tree (Banipal Books, 2007), which takes the reader to a village in Lebanon early in the 1975-1990 civil war.

One Day in April is set in Lebanon on 13 April 1977. Its first-person narrator is an acclaimed Lebanese-Armenian photojournalist Krikor Krikorian – known as Koko – who works for the Daily Sun newspaper in Beirut.

On the morning of the day in question the newspaper instructs Koko to travel to the Bekaa Valley where he is to meet the writer Nader Abi Nader in order to cover a big wedding. The two men are to go to a village that hosts a number of fugitives, among them former prisoners who freed themselves from Raml prison.

Koko is aghast at being given this joint assignment with Nader, “the bastard who’d robbed me of my first love”. At the beginning of the civil war Koko had been close to Nader, who had studied experimental theatre in Poland, and had worked on Nader’s film project portraying the Mediterranean as the “Blue Pirate”.

But the friendship had turned to hatred after Nader and Koko’s free-spirited painter lover Najla Helou betrayed him. Najla vanished from Koko’s life and Koko married Arsiné, a childhood friend and fellow Armenian. He is now the devoted father of a baby son who on that day in April has taken his first steps. And yet “the imprint of my time with Najla still lingers inside me, a shard of unfinished business.”

El Hage has set his novel on the second anniversary of the killing of Palestinians on a bus in the Ain al-Rummaneh suburb of Beirut, a massacre that is widely seen as the spark of the civil war. And April is also the month in which massacres of Armenians in Turkey began in 1915. Koko observes: “April is the cruellest month indeed, the month of genocide, when Armenians throughout the world remember their massacred forefathers ...”

As in his previous novels, El Hage delights in the details of everyday life. He brings a strong human dimension and a humorous touch to his portrayal of characters caught up in the chaos and bloodshed of the Lebanese civil war. Writers, filmmakers and artists try in vain to use their creativity to combat the growing sectarianism. The real-life restaurateur and cultural activist George Zeenny organises an anti-war arts festival in the streets of Beirut.

During his drive to the Bekaa Koko recreates in flashbacks his passionate love for the notorious red-haired Bohemian artist Najla, who believed “monogamy was hypocrisy and marriage a silver coffin for cowards.” And he recalls his Nader and their shooting of scenes for the never-completed “Blue Pirate” in Tyre from where boatloads of refugees were fleeing Lebanon.

In the Bekaa , with its wild landscape, thriving cannabis industry, outlaws, and glimpses of a so-called white witch, Koko enters a different world. He encounters a now-vulnerable Nader, and must decide how to deal with this detested love rival. He learns that the Bekaa wedding is intended to reconcile feuding tribes and that the fugitives from prison have proposals to stop the escalation of violence in Lebanon.

The narrative is occasionally over-crowded with information, as in some almost ethnographic descriptions of Bekaa life and traditions. But Koko holds the reader’s interest right up to the novel’s disconcerting, even shocking, conclusion. The novel is a fitting finale to El Hage’s accomplishment in producing a highly readable trilogy, which gives unique visions of Lebanon and of a civil war which has continuing repercussions.

Susannah Tarbush

British Museum boosts its acqusitions of modern M Eastern art

2011-10-12T22:24:00.004+01:00

Endless Prayers by Y Z Kami, 2008

The British Museum has highlighted the role being played by recent new funding in its collecting of contemporary Middle Eastern Art, in an announcement released yesterday in London.

The Museum has been collecting modern and contemporary art from the Middle East since the 1980s. To date, this collection contains works by over 200 established and emerging artists from across the region, many of which featured in the influential Word into Art exhibition in 2006 (which travelled to Dubai in 2008).

The Museum has been a pioneer in the acquisition of this material and now, in its fourth decade of collecting, it houses the pre-eminent collection of art from this region in the UK. Modern artworks in the British Museum collection are principally works on paper, and are selected to complement the historical collections because they ‘speak of their time’. The collection of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art, therefore, represents social and historical realities of the modern Middle East.

"The Museum has been fortunate in its efforts to develop and expand this collection with assistance from generous individuals and foundations," the Museum's announcement says. "Most recently, in early 2011, Maryam and Edward Eisler provided significant funding to help us expand our activities in this area. This adds to the generosity of the Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Art (CaMMEA) acquisition group, which was formed in 2009."

Since its inception, the CaMMEA group of individuals has established an annual fund which has allowed the Museum to acquire modern and contemporary artworks by more than 50 artists from the Middle Eastern region as a whole. Some members of the group have also chosen to make additional and substantial anonymous donations. "This funding allows the Museum to respond quickly to the contemporary art market and to be strategic in its collecting policy."

The Eisler fund is enabling the acquisition of important works by Iranian artists, which include the modernist Nicky Nodjoumi, calligraphic scrolls by Golnaz Fathi, a photographic work by Sadegh Tirafkan and plans for an acquisition of a rare work by Charles Hossein Zenderoudi are in the pipeline. These works will complement the existing works by Iranian artists in the British Museum collection, including those featured in Word into Art, as well as those acquired through the CaMMEA acquisition group, such as Bita Ghezeyalagh, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh,Y.Z.Kami and Timo Nasseri.

The Eisler donation has also sponsored a one-year curatorial position to work with the senior curator on researching, administering and developing the modern and contemporary collection at the British Museum, and has also provided for a report being commissioned from curator and writer Vali Mahlouji to create a strategy for collecting Iranian art for the future.

Beyond Iran, the Museum continues to collect works by artists from across the Middle East. Since the Word into Art exhibition, the CaMMEA acquisition group and other private donations have also allowed the Museum to continue to expand its collection of Arab, Turkish and Central Asian art. Over the last two years,it has acquired works by Ahmed Moustafa, Huda Lutfi (Egypt); Marwan Kassab Bachi and Monif Ajjaj (Syria); Jean-Marc Nahas, Mounira Al-Solh (Lebanon) and Kholoud Sharafi (UAE), to name a few.

The Museum has also acquired a number of works by Palestinian artists, such as Steve Sabella and Suleiman Mansour, alongside 35 Years of Occupation, a collection of 35 prints by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli artists. Recent acquisitions also include drawings by Hajra Waheed and Imran Mudassar, two artists of South Asian origin, as well as a series of photographs by American-born John Jurayj (a first-generation Lebanese artist based in New York) and a set of paper sculptures by Michael Rakowitz (an American artist of Iraqi origin).

Untitled diptych by Sabhan Adam

In the same timeframe, over a dozen artworks have been donated to the collection by donors, collectors and artists, and these include an important selection of works by the well known Turkish Modernist, Burhan Dogancay, a large painting by Mehrdad Shoghi (Iran), a photographic triptych by Lalla Essaydi (Morocco), two photographs by Rula Halawani and Yazan Khalili (Palestine), a sculpture by Mona Saudi (Jordan) and works on paper by Fathi Hassan (Sudan/Egypt), Adel Siwi (Egypt) and Sabhan Adam (Syria).

"This kind of collecting is of critical importance to the Museum as we seek to ensure that the collections continue to reflect world cultures both ancient and modern." the Museum says. "It is extremely important to place the Museum’s Middle Eastern collections in context and to show the influences of historical traditions on the emerging artistic trends of today. The Museum is in a unique position to place contemporary Middle Eastern art in the broader context of ancient and modern global culture, and is an invaluable resource for students seeking first-hand study of artworks as part of their research."

Maryam Eisler comments: “The reach of a global institution such as the British Museum will be a useful tool in ensuring that their collection will include a broad cross section of Middle Eastern artists, who are today poised to conquer previously unchartered territory." She adds: "My hope is that through our joint efforts great Iranian contemporary art will become readily accessible to a wider Western audience."

The launch of the CaMMEA acquisition group also encouraged the Art Fund to support a collection of Middle Eastern photography, which is a joint project with the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), now nearing completion. The Art Fund have contributed a large sum to assist both museums to collect photographic works and this shared collection will be displayed in Light from the Middle East, a major exhibition at the V&A opening at the end of 2012, alongside other photographic works from both museums. The Museum will continue to work closely with institutions such as the V&A and Tate in order to consolidate interest in this area, create complimentary collections and host joint events.

No. 1 (from the series The White Cube), by Walid Siti (2010)

Examples of contemporary works from the British Museum collection will be displayed during the forthcoming major exhibition ‘Hajj: Journey to the heart of Islam’, such as a drawing from the Kurdish artist Walid Siti’s White Cube series, a photogram entitled Road to Mecca by Maha Malluh, and a series of photo-gravures by Ahmed Mater, both Saudi Arabian artists. These works will be displayed alongside historical material to show how artists today are inspired by the Hajj. . Other examples from the collection can be seen in the current display of modern Syrian art in the John Addis Islamic Gallery, which includes pieces by five Syrian artists from the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of this century. These are shown alongside pieces by the famous Syrian Modernist poet Adonis and four artists’ books by fellow Arab artists, which are directly inspired by Adonis’ poetry. This display showcases a number of recent acquisitions, such as a donation made to the museum in 2010 and two works purchased through the CaMMEA acquisition group.

The British Museum’s collection of Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Art is accessible through the collections online database –via britishmuseum.org – or is available to view by appointment through the Middle East study room.

Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize

2011-10-11T20:37:00.005+01:00

Briony Everroad (R) awards the Young Translators' Prize to Wiam El-Tamami

The climax to the award ceremony for second annual Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, held some days ago at Foyles bookshop in London, was the announcement that the £1,000 award had gone to 27-year-old Egyptian Wiam El-Tamami.

The announcement was made by the prize’s founder, Briony Everroad, who presented Wiam with the £1,000 prize for her Arabic-English translation of the short story ‘Layl Qouti’ (‘Gothic Night’) by Egyptian writer Mansoura Ezz Eldin.

El-Tamami is a freelance editor of literary translation at the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press. She has lived in Egypt, Kuwait, England and Vietnam and obtained a BA in English & Comparative Literature from AUC in 2004. She subsequently did an MA in Writing for Children at the University of Winchester, England.

El-Tamami said she was thrilled at her win. “The story was a wonderful choice for a translation competition — it presented just enough technical challenges while leaving plenty of room for creative interpretation. I really enjoyed travelling through the author’s text and mine to find the right mood, voice and style.'

El-Tamimi’s entry won out of 92 entries from translators based in 18 countries. The figure was a decrease from the first year when the designated language was Spanish and there were more than 230 entries.

Everroad founded the Young Translators’ Prize last year to mark the centenary of Harvill Secker in its first incarnation: publisher Martin Secker Ltd. Harvill Secker itself was born in 2005 when Secker and Warburg merged with the Harvill Press. Everroad is an editor at Harvill Secker, where she has worked for five years. Her authors include two major Norwegian thriller writers, Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum, and Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov (who writes in Russian).

The prize aims to help young translators make the leap to a career in the difficult-to-enter literary translation arena. The prize has an age restriction of 18 to 34, and is limited to entrants who have not previously translated, or been contracted to translate, more than one full-length work for print or online publication. Rather than make the prize specific to one source language, it was decided that the language should change each year. And rather than being judged on the basis of existing published translations, like most literary translation prizes, the Young Translators’ Prize requires all entrants to translate the same piece.

Everroad noted that the winner of the prize in its first year, Beth Fowler, had at the time been working as a commercial translator. Fowler was interested in becoming a literary translator, and her prize helped her make the vital transition. Her first-full length translation, of the 2006 debut novel Open Door by Argentine writer Iosi Havilio, will be published by Any Other Stories next month.

Everroad said: “The really nice thing about this prize is that a whole bunch of people got excited by it and have come on board and wanted to join in one way and another. This year, for instance, Banipal is very kindly giving the winner a subscription to the magazine, and offering an opportunity for the winning translator to do some work for them. Also, in the future we have plans to work with some kind of mentorships.”

For this year’s prize Harvill Secker teamed up with Foyles. El-Tamami’s cash prize was supplemented by a selection of Harvill Secker titles and by £100 worth of Foyles tokens. The prize also has support from Granta magazine, which published El-Tamami’s winning translation on its website the day after the prize was awarded (an interview with El-Tamami was subsequently added) .

At the prize-giving Everroad announced a new partnership between the prize and the Crossing Border Festival, held annually in the Netherlands and Belgium. Winners of the prize will from now on be invited to participate in the festival’s ‘Chronicles’ project which invites four writers and six translators to be writers and translator in-residence for the duration of the festival.

Beth Fowler will attend this year’s Crossing Border festival being held on 15-19 November. Wiam El-Tamimi will be invited to next year’s festival.

The prize giving was preceded by a panel discussion chaired by Daniel Hahn [pictured], programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and an award-winning translator. Hahn introduced Everroad as “a great champion of literary translation. Those of us who translate complain about publishers quite a lot – but we don’t complain about this one. We like Harvill Secker, which has always been a very good friend to – and celebrator of – really fine literature in translation.”

It was Hahn who suggested that Arabic be selected as the language for the prize in its second year. The organisers of the prize consulted the Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon, co-founder and editor of Banipal magazine over the choice of the text for the competition. He suggested Ezz Eldin’s ‘Layl Qouti’ .

Ez Eldin is one Egypt’s leading young writers. She was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF – the Arabic Booker) in 2009 for her second novel Beyond Paradise. She is also one of the Beirut39 writers – 39 Arab writers aged 39 or less selected from more than 450 names by a jury in 2009.

The panel at the prize giving included two judges of the prize – Everroad, and the eminent literary interviewer, journalist and critic Maya Jaggi. Jaggi, who has judged many literary competitions, said she had been pleased to be asked to be a judge for the Young Translators’ Prize. This was because “I review a lot of translations, and I’m aware of how little is coming out in translation – and Arabic in particular is so badly served.”

Also on the panel was Professor Paul Starkey, head of the Arabic Department at the University of Durham. Starkey is well acquainted with Ez Eldin’s work, having translated her first novel Maryam’s Maze (AUC Press, 2007). He also translated her story Déjà Vu for the anthology Emerging Arab Voices (Saqi, 2010). Next month Interlink Publishing Group imprint Clockroot Books publishes Starkey’s translation of Palestinian Adiana Shibli’s novel We Are All Equally far from Love.

The judges of the prize included one Arabic-English literary translator: Anthony Calderbank. Calderbank was previously British Council deputy director in Saudi Arabia, but was recently appointed as the Council’s director in South Sudan, the newest country in the world. The judging process was conducted over speakerphone to South Sudan.

The fourth judge, the prize-winning British novelist Penelope Lively, was unable to attend the prize-giving for health reasons. Lively was born in Cairo in 1933 and her girlhood in Egypt is the basis of her memoir Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (Harper Collins, 1994). Her novel “Moon Tiger”, which won the Booker Prize in 1987, is set partly in Egypt.

A major issue discussed by the panel was that question of what the judges had been looking for in the translations. Everroad said it was crucial that a translation read well. “It needs to be a wonderful piece of writing that any reader in a bookshop of anywhere else is going to engage with.”

She said: “Wiam not only rose to the challenges of the text, fully comprehending the author's Arabic, but also produced a beautiful piece of writing. The translation displayed an elegance of style alongside fidelity to the Arabic original, yet the story is wonderfully articulated in the translator’s own voice.” The story had presented many challenges to the translator with its “shifting tenses and a dreamlike structure which was far from straightforward. Translators needed to manage the English text very carefully in order to maintain a sense of narrative logic.”

Rather than present the judges with all 92 stories, the organisers weeded out weaker entries in an initial in-house process. Everroad said a fascinating part of the judging process was that when the judges got down to the smaller number of stories, with each new translation “you really want to keep reading the story even though you’ve read it many times before. It creates a new tension for you even though you know the ending and so on. If it flows well it’s almost like reading it afresh, which is a really good sign.”

Hahn asked Jaggi what, as a judge who does not know Arabic, she had looked for in judging the translation as a piece of English. Jaggi said the brief had been “beautiful expression and voice in English” and that “first impressions matter a lot, because when you’re reading without knowing the original, you’re thinking ‘if you can’t write, you can’t translate’.”

The judges were looking for a translator who was also a “writer” in English, and “that type of writing involves a range of vocabulary. And you’re looking for someone who has a nuanced approach and an appreciation of language itself.” Beauty of expression “doesn’t have to be smooth or elegant –it could be staccato and jarring, and in different registers depending on the original.”

The three judges who did not read Arabic depended on the fourth, Arabic scholar Tony Calderabank, for accuracy. “He actually ruled out a couple of things and we deferred to him – because if there were inaccuracies, not simply stretching interpretations, then that was a real problem because editors need to know what they’ve got to work with is accurate,” Jaggi said.

Starkey said although there is a temptation to assume that the first quality in translation of Arabic is a wonderful knowledge of the language, that alone “doesn’t actually get you anywhere in producing a piece of English which people want to read, and if people don’t want to read it, publishers won’t want to publish it.”

Starkey said that theoreticians have tried to formulate the qualities required to be a translator “and you get things like the translator must have equal knowledge of the source language and target language, and of the source culture and the target culture. It gets extraordinarily tedious that sort of theorising, especially if you have to teach it, as I do. But none the less there is something behind it.”

Briony said one of the challenges for the non-Arabic reading judges was repetition in the Arabic. “We liked the versions where people had found creative solutions around that and came up with more adventurous vocabulary to vary that.”

Starkey said there a number of characteristics of Arabic prose that commonly cause problems, including repetition of vocabulary, or related root items, and long sentences. Combine these problems with “the very carefully worked out vocabulary and phraseology that Mansoura uses and you get quite a lot of problems in translating it [her story] into decent, feasible English.”

from L to R: Banipal publisher Margaret Obank, Wiam El-Tamami, Samuel Shimon and Maya Jaggi

The panel was asked about the current state of Arabic translation into English, given Jaggi’s comment that it was “badly served”. Starkey said that although only a small proportion of Arabic literary works find their way into English, “the temptation is to be slightly too pessimistic”. He pointed to a number of developments in recent years including the Arabic Booker (International Prize for Arabic Fiction – IPAF), the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and “a number of smaller exercises” such as the workshop for young writers that is associated with the Arabic Booker. “A number of publishers are taking more interest in Arabic literature. More could and should be done, but my feeling is that things are getting better not worse, so I’m not in total despair on this matter.”

Jaggi noted that the number of entries for the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize has grown since the prize was inaugurated in 2006. In addition, English-language publishers and literary agents have attended the annual IPAF awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi in the four years of its existence. They are interested not only in the winning entry, but in other shortlisted novels.

Starkey was asked whether enough attention is paid on Arabic-English translation courses to the development of English writing skills.. He said that at Durham University, the MA in translation is mainly taken by Arab students paid for by their governments. “They are not interested in literary translation – they’re interested in legal translation, in business translation, and that sort of thing. You find the odd one who is keen on literary translation, but as far as formal teaching goes, it is a very marginal activity.”
Susannah Tarbush

garnet secures english rights to yemeni wajdi al-ahdal's novel 'a land without jasmine'

2011-10-10T16:38:00.005+01:00

Garnet Publishing of Britain has announced that it has acquired the world English rights to the novel A Land without Jasmine by the renowned Yemeni novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and dramatist Wajdi al-Ahdal. The novel was published in Sanaa in 2008 by Markaz Abbadi in 2008 under the title Bilad bila Sama, meaning A Land without Sky. The English translation, by William Maynard Hutchins, is due for publication in autumn 2012. (Two excerpts from the translation appeared in the 160-page special feature Literature in Yemen Today published in issue 36 of Banipal magazine in late 2009; the picture above appeared in the feature).

Garnet provides an enticing résumé of the novel:
“A Land without Jasmine is a sexy, satirical detective story about the disappearance of a young woman student from Yemen’s Sanaa University. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, beginning with Jasmine herself. The mystery surrounding her disappearance comes into clearer focus with each self-serving and idiosyncratic account provided by an acquaintance, family member, or detective.

“The hallucinatory ending, although appropriately foreshadowed, may come as a Sufi surprise for the reader. Less mystically inclined readers may want to reread this tale to construct an alternative ending. This short novel has echoes of both the Sherlock Holmes stories and The Catcher in the Rye, because in addition to the mystery and a murder, the novel contains candid discussions of coming of age in a land of sexual repression, in a land without Jasmine. Wajdi al-Ahdal is a satirical author with a fresh and provocative voice and an excellent eye for telling details.”

Al-Ahdali’s other novels are Qawarib Jabaliya (Mountain Boats, Beirut, 2002), Himar Bayna al-Aghani (A Donkey Among the Songs, Beirut 2004), and Faylasuf al-Kurantina (Quarantine Philosopher, Sanaa 2007), which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - the Arabic Booker) in 2008. Al-Ahdal is one of the 'Beirut 39' - 39 Arab writers aged under 40 who were selected from more than 450 entrants by a panel of judges in 2009 as being of particular merit.

Mountain Boats aroused a storm of controversy. Garnet says: “An extremist campaign against the book drove al-Ahdal into exile, and the book’s publisher [Ubadi] faced charges. When the German Nobel Laureate Günter Grass visited Yemen in December 2002 for a cultural conference, he was received by the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to whom he mentioned Wajdi al-Ahdal’s plight, asking the President to protect the author. Al-Ahdal was then allowed to return to his country.

“Himar Bayna al-Aghani is dedicated to Günter Grass in appreciation. Although al-Ahdal’s passport was seized at the Sanaa Airport in the spring of 2010 he was later allowed to travel. At present he is in Sanaa, with electricity one hour a day.”

Al-Ahdal, who was born in 1973, has a degree in literature from Sanaa University. He won the Afif prize for the short story in 1997, a gold medal for a dramatic text in the Festival for Arab Youth in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1998, and the youth prize of the Yemeni President for the short story in 1999. He currently works in the National Library, Dar al-Kutub, in Sanaa.

In addition to al-Ahdal’s novels, several collections of his short stories have been published: Zahrat al-Abir (The Passer-by’s Flower Sanaa 1997), Surat al-Battal (Portrait of an Unemployed Man, Amman 1998), Ratanat al-Zaman al-Miqmaq (Gibberish in a Time of Ventriloquism, Sanaa 1998), and Harb lam Ya‘alam bi-Wuqu‘iha Ahad (A War No One Knew About, Sanaa 2001).

Al-Ahdal’s screenplay al-Ughniya al-Mashura (The Enchanted Song) was published in Sanaa in 2006. His play al-Suqut min Shurfat al-‘Alam (Falling off the Balcony of the World) was published in Sanaa in 2007.

Susannah Tarbush

countering al-qaeda in london & debate on 'non-violent extremism'

2011-10-01T08:03:00.004+01:00

Controversy in Britain on claims that “non-violent extremism” leads to terrorism
by
Susannah Tarbush
[Arabic translation published in Al-Hayat 1 October 2011]

In Britain a battle is raging over the question of whether “non-violent Islamist extremism” leads to violent extremism and terrorism. British Prime Minister David Cameron believes that non-violent extremism does indeed lead to violence and terrorism. He laid the foundations of the government’s new direction towards fighting violent extremism In his speech in February to the Munich security conference, in which he said: “To those who say non-violent extremists actually help to keep young vulnerable men away from violence, I say nonsense.”

Cameron rejects claims that Islamist terror threats are fuelled by poverty and by foreign policy grievances. He asserts that as evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences it is clear that “many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence.”

He said governments must think much harder bout those Muslim groups who it is in the public interest to work with. Cameron asserts that governments should not engage “non-violent extremist “Islamist groups. They should not receive public funding, should not share platforms with ministers, and “we must stop these groups from reaching people in publicly-funded institutions like universities or even, in the British case, prisons.”

The British government’s new policies within the Preventing Violent Extremism programme – know for short as “Prevent” – announced during the summer reflect Cameron’s drive against non-violent extremism. For example, government funding has been being withdrawn from Muslim organisations and individuals considered to support non-violent extremism.

In a speech on 19 September in New York at a UN symposium on counter-terrorism, the British home Secretary Theresa May outlined the new Prevent programme and stressed the need to defeat not only terrorist organisations but “the terrorist ideology”.

Among the policies Britain is adopting is using “community groups, local councils, health workers, teachers and other professionals to help identify those people who may be vulnerable to radicalisation.”

Solutions to the problems of terrorism and radicalisation must be found in homes, schools, mosques, universities, hospitals and “even in prison”. The solutions “rely on local communities, professionals, families and friends.”

Critics of Cameron and May’s new Prevent policies say they are counterproductive, and unfairly demonises certain Muslim organisations and individuals who have in fact played an important role in fighting Al-Qaeda influence. The prevent policies could further alienate British Muslim communities.

And there is much unease at the government’s saying that for example doctors, university teachers and those working with prisoners should identify those who may be “vulnerable” to Islamist radicalisation. Are doctors, teachers and other professionals, as well as parents and other family members, supposed to become spies and informers - and how are they supposed to identify those who might be “vulnerable” to radicalisation? Won’t this for example destroy freedom of speech on university campuses and destroy relations of trust between students and their teachers?

One of the most outspoken critics against the new Prevent policies is Dr Robert Lambert [pictured], a retired policeman who was for the 30 years 1977 and 2007, a policeman at Scotland Yard. He spent most of that time within Special Branch, which deals with terrorism and political violence in the UK.

It might seem surprising for a former Scotland Yard policeman, with many years of experience fighting terrorism, to be so passionate in his defence of groups and individuals whom many, including top levels of British government, see as non-violent Islamist extremists and thus potentially having a dangerous influence.

But Dr Lambert bases his beliefs on his practical experiences in the last years of his career at Scotland Yard, when he and a police colleague set up the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU). The idea of the MCU was to establish partnerships with Muslim community leaders to assess and combat the spread of Al-Qaeda’s influence in London. This partnership fought the influence of such dangerous violent-minded extremists in London as Abu Hamza, Faisal Abdullah, Abu Qatada, who were convicted and sentenced by courts.

Since 2009 Lambert has been the co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) at Exeter University in south-west England. He is also a part-time lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Now Lambert has written a book on his experiences, which was published by the independent London publisher Hurst & Company on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US. The book is entitled “Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership”. It is based on the thesis Lambert wrote for the PhD Exeter University awarded him in 2010.

The book describes in much detail how Muslims in the community played a vital role with the police in challenging and reducing the threat of Al-Qaeda influence in two main projects. One was at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London which was under the sway of the Egyptian self-styled preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri, who with his one blind eye and his two hooks instead of hands was a familiar figure in the British media. In 2006 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for terror-related offences. (Although he has completed his sentence (he had been held in prison since 2004) he is still held there on remand while the US seeks his extradition on terror-related offices in the US.)

Abu Hamza exerted a pernicious and lasting influence on his followers at Finsbury Park Mosque. In 2003 he was ejected but continued to pray outside in the street with his followers. Lambert examines in detai in his book the joint Muslim-police work that led to the ousting of Hamza’s supporters from the mosque in 2005.
The other major project aimed at countering Al-Qaeda influence was in Brixton in south London where local Salafis successfully countered the influence of Al-Qaeda-influenced violent extremists such as Abu Qatada and Abdullah el-Faisal.

In relation to Brixton, Lambert is today highly critical of the fact that as part of its policy of not funding organisations or individuals it sees as “non-violent extremist”, the government has withdrawn much of its previous funding from the organisation Strategy to Reach Empower and Educate Teenagers, known for short as STREET. STREET combats violent gang warfare in the Brixton area and thereby aims to make young Muslims less vulnerable to violent extremism. The director of Street is Dr Abdul Haqq Baker, leader of the Brixton Salafi community – and under the government’s new Prevent policy a Salafi, even if non-violent, is seen as an extremist. The slashing of funding threatens to undo all the positive work that STREET did in the community – work that earned it much praise last autumn from the think tank Centre for Social Justice which was set up by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.

Lambert’s book has received much attention in the media, and among security and political analysts. Among the events related to its publication, the author has made presentations and discussed his book at two prominent London-based think tanks; the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Chatham House.

In an interview with BBC Radio, Lambert declared that British government policy on how to combat Islamist terrorism is wrong. The policy “is demonising [[ie portraying as evil, or as devils]] some of the most effective Muslim groups and organisations against Al-Qaeda,” he said. He worked with such groups while at Scotland Yard and “these were Muslim individuals who showed great bravery in support of the safety of this country and many of them achieved outstanding results. For them to be demonised as extremist is not only unhelpful, it is seriously unjust.” Such people should never be demonised under any circumstances, he said.

Lambert added that such people had been effective partners of the police in counter-terrorism, and had shown bravery in confronting the real violent extremists – people who have been convicted of violent extremism, such as Abu Hamza and Abdullah al-Faisal.

Lambert pointed to the influence on the government of the book “Celsius 7/7” by the Education Secretary Michael Gove. The book was published after the four suicide bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005 in which 52 innocent people were killed (the attacks are known as 7/7).

Gove, who is an ardent supporter of Israel, plays an influential part in government arguing for tough measures against Islamists. His book looks at the roots of Islamist terrorism and at the Islamist “threat to civilisation” and warns against the “appeasing” of Islamism.

Lambert noted that to mark his retirement from the police, a celebration was held in Lambert’s honour at Scotland Yard at which the guests included 40 to 50 Muslims “who are individuals who are now being regularly demonised as extremists.”

The book was launched in London at an event at Portcullis House, at the Houses of Parliament.. The event was chaired by the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn well-known for his leftist and anti-war positions and involvement against Islamophobia – the hatred and fear of Islam and Muslims.

Robert Lambert presented his book and outlined its contents. The other speakers were Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU); Ibrahim Hewitt [pictured], Chairman of the British charity Interpal (the full name of which is Palestinian Relief and Development Fund,) and Anas Altikriti, Chief Executive Officer of the Cordoba Foundation. Hewitt and Altikriti are often described as Islamists, and are the type of people the government no longer wishes to work in partnership with.

The European Muslim Research Centre at Exeter University, of which Lambert is co-director, has attracted considerable controversy. The Conservative MP Robert Halfon sought information about the Centre’s Funding under a Freedom of Information inquiry earlier this year, and found that it had received £50,000 from the Cordoba Foundation and £50,000 from IslamExpo.

Halfon complained that these funders of the centre share the political objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood. But a statement from Exeter University said: "No one in the research team has any link whatsoever to companies or organisations with a political interest in the subject. The analysis and reporting of the findings is independent. The University of Exeter is not aware of any relationship between the Cordoba Foundation, Islam Expo and the Muslim Brotherhood."

Halfon also found that the Centre received a gift of £35,000 from Al-Jazeera Satellite Network, and asked for an explanation for this from the university.

Another source of controversy over the European Muslim Research Centre was that it had to publish an apology in relation to the first study it published, on Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime in the UK. The study identified the local MP in the Tower Hamlets area of East London, Jim Fitzpatrick, and some Tower Hamlets Labour councillors as Islamophobic – ie people who hate Islam and Muslims. The apology said that the university had not found the actions or intentions of these individuals were Islamophobic or racist in any way.

The European Muslim Research Centre is opposed to the position of the Quilliam Foundation. Set up as the world’s fist counter-terrorism think tank by two former members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz. They claimed that having been at one time Islamist extremists themselves, they understand Islamism from the inside. Quilliam has received generous government funding and has much influence on government thinking. It stresses the need to fight Islamist ideology; Ed Husain is fond of saying that non-violent extremists provides the “mood music to which violent extremists dance”.

As well as opposing Quilliam, Lambert is also critical of “powerful neoconservative think thanks” such as Policy Exchange, which equate support for the Palestinians with backing for Islamist movements.

Britain continues to face a substantial terror threat, as the recent arrests of seven young men and a woman in the English city of Birmingham in relation to a suspected terror plot shows. The controversy over whether non-violent extremism does or does not lead to violent extremism looks set to continue and intensify given the growing presence of voices on both sides of the argument.

diana athill interviewed by jeremy lewis at soho literary festival

2011-09-27T10:57:00.012+01:00

The interview with the legendary 93-year-old literary editor, memoirist and fiction writer Diana Athill conducted by Jeremy Lewis last Sunday at the first-ever Soho Literary Festival , and billed as 'Diana Athill's Pleasures and Perils', was a memorable and at times hilarious event. Lewis has known Diana since the late 1960s when he went to work at the publisher André Deutsch as a very junior editor; she was already renowned as one of the great editors of London. He remembered the Hungarian André Deutsch as a lovable and wonderful man, but at the same time as highly volatile and rather alarming. Athill was a "haven of peace and calm" in the Deutsch empire.

Athill is the author of six acclaimed volumes of memoir, plus the compendium Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill (Granta Books, 2009. She has also had success with fiction writing; in 1958, a year in which she wrote a flurry of short stories, she won the Sunday newspaper the Observer's Short Story Prize: "That was perhaps the happiest moment of my life, but it didn't make me think I could do anything with my stories," she told Lewis. A short-story collection An Unavoidable Delay appeared in 1962 and a novel, Don't Look at me Like That in 1967.

After the interview Athill signed copies of her latest publication Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend (Granta Books; the title is a play on the title of her first book of memoir, Instead of a Letter) which contains her letters to the American poet Edward Field written over a period of 30 years. The Daily Telegraph published an extract last week.

Jeremy Lewis has flitted between being a publisher, literary agent, reviewer and biographer and has written three volumes of autobiography. He is currently the commissioning editor of The Oldie magazine (edited by former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams), which presented the Soho Festival - although Lewis jokes that his job title is a sort of contradiction in terms as the Oldie doesn't actually commission articles.

Lewis's discussion with Athill was rich in reminiscences and anecdotes. She came from a very bookish family, with books everywhere, and was from an early age "tremendously hung up on books". As she grew up she imagined the best thing in the world to work in would be something to do with books "but it seemed, in the depths of Norfolk where I lived, impossible" to be say a writer or publisher. But she did think it would be nice to perhaps be a librarian.

Lewis asked whether like him she had drifted into publishing, or whether she had thought it was something she should do. "Pure chance" she said. She was working in "a very humble part of the BBC, never anywhere near a microphone" when at a party she met a little Hungarian man called André Deutsch who had been interned on the Isle of Man and was working for a publisher. He sat on the floor and caught her attention because he kept singing The Foggy Foggy Dew. "We got to know each other and we had a little affair". He told her he was going to become a publisher and asked if she would like to join him in his venture.

He founded first Allan Wingate, and later André Deutsch in the face of constant financial difficulties. Athill recalled the stink kicked up by the editor of the Sunday Times when Deutsch published Norman Mailer's first novel The Naked and the Dead. Mailer's language reflected that of soldiers fighting in Korea; in America it had been published with the word "fuck" replaced by "fug" all the way through. Even with this change to Mailer's text, no British publisher would touch the book- except for the young and impetuous André Deutsch. "We wanted in fact to restore 'fuck'" Athill told Lewis. Even with "fug" their publication of the book ran into trouble. The Sunday Times editor happened to pick up a review copy in the office of the newspaper's literary editor. He was outraged by it, and in an article on the front page of his newspaper denounced the publication of a book so vile that "no decent man could leave it where his women or children might happen to see it." Deutsch were served with an injunction against publication, but the Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross gave permission for publication.

She spoke of how her first volume of memoir Instead of a Letter (1963) was written out of a sadness in her past, which had left her with a sense of failure. "When that book was published - had finished being written, really - all that sadness vanished completely". She added: "I concluded from that that I wasn't a professional writer but I needed something horrible to happen to me and then I would write a book, to make it better."

After that "two nasty things happened, not to me but things that I knew about, and closely enough to be haunted by. I dealt with them, so to speak, by writing about them". One was the suicide (in her flat) of her Egyptian friend the writer Waguih Ghali (which she wrote about in After a Funeral,1986). The other concerned "that mad man" the African-American activist and writer Hakim Jamal, whose British girlfriend Gale Benson was murdered in Trinidad and who is the subject of Make Believe: A True Story (1993). She put the manuscripts of both books in a drawer and they weren't published until years later.

Later on "I realised bit by bit that I was able to write for fun, not just as a therapeutic exercise." She wrote Stet: A Memoir (2000) about her nearly five decades as editor of some of the most celebrated books in modern English-language fiction. The roll call of authors with whom she worked includes Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, Elizabeth David, Gitta Sereny, John Updike and Mordecai Richler. She famously fell out with V S Naipaul. Earlier this year she laughed off his telling an interviewer that she writes "feminine tosh" .

Stet was followed by Yesterday Morning: a very English childhood (2002) and Somewhere Towards the End (2008), which won the Costa Biography Award.

Lewis observed that she is in danger of becoming a national treasure, and asked how she felt about suddenly becoming so famous, having been a "behind the scenes" person for most of her working life. She said "well, it is very very rum, it is odd, it's also rather funny". But she enjoys it: "I even enjoy this sort of thing" she said smiling at the audience. "It is much better than sitting at home in my old persons home where I now live and twiddling one's thumbs."

Lewis said: "One of the interesting things about you Diana is that you write very well about old age and you also write a lot about sex. I always thought of you in the old days as a very English woman - I was perhaps surprised at your being so..."
"I lived a secret life" she interjected. "I'd been brought up by a very respectable family and done all the things they wouldn't have approved of. I'd become an agnostic, voted Labour and gone to bed with people I wasn't married to. So I didn't make any fuss about it, I rather went underground. That was cowardly I think but on the other hand it made life easier."

Lewis reminded Athill that he had once asked her on the phone what she thought André Deutsch would make of her great success. Athill said: "I thought for a bit, and I said 'I think he would have taken credit for it.'"

At the question and answer session after the interview Athill was asked about her letters to Edward Field in her new book. She explained he was a very old friend of someone she had published, the American writer Alfred Chester (whose books include The Exquisite Corpse). She and Edward thought he was a brilliant writer, but "poor Alfred was so mad that in the end he went to Israel and he died" in 1971.

Chester had for a short time been very famous and Edward was trying to restore his reputation in New York. Edward knew Athill had been his publisher and wrote to ask if she had any letters or interesting information about Alfred that she could give him. She wrote back and thus their three-decade correspondence began. He came to London with Neil, his partner, soon afterwards "and the day we met it was very strange, lovely really, we knew at once that we were friends." They corresponded "because we had so much to say to each other".

There has been a resurgence of interest in the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali since the republication of Beer in the Snooker Club in December 2010 by Serpent's Tail, with an introduction by Athill. In addition, the publication of the novel in Arabic translation drew him to attention in the Arab world. Asked whether Ghali had been working on a second novel at the time of his death, and whether she might wrote more about him, Athill said he never wrote anything else after Beer in the Snooker Club. "I said everything I had to say about him in that book [After a Funeral] and there is nothing more I could say."

Asked who her favourites among her own authors were, Athill said "as a person, probably the person I liked best was Molly Keane, the Irish novelist. A lovely person, I loved her dearly. And I was very very fond of Mordecai Richler, such a nice man, absolutely unchanged by success, he really went on being himself. Jean Rhys I was tremendously involved with." Asked about other favourite writers she said "I'm mad about Hilary Mantel, W G Sebald was a wonderful author, William Dalrymple, and I suppose of all the books I've ever read it would have to be the obvious things like War and Peace."
Susannah Tarbush

the abu salim prison art of libyan artist mohammed bin al amin

2011-09-02T07:55:00.008+01:00

update: 19 Sept 2011:
The pictures & notes below were posted on 2 Sept. But today I came across the photo above that shows all the drawings - they have an amazing impact.

--

Last night on BBC1 news at 10pm Jeremy Bowen reported from the hell that was Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, Libya, now empty of its prisoners. "Torture was routine, sometimes prisoners disappeared, and now you can just walk in," Jeremy said. As he wandered into one cell the camera showed two walls covered with drawings and writing. "Even here one inmate didn't hide his defiance" Jeremy said. "He signed his name, Mohammed Bin Al Amin above his dreams of freedom".
The camera panned down from the signature to a haunting face gazing out through bars clutched by the subject's hands. One can only imagine the conditions under which the drawing was done. Powerful testimony to the unquenchability of an artist's spirit. It must be the work of the famous artist from Misrata, who was seized by Gaddafi forces from his Misrata studio on 18 February together with his poet brother Elhabib Elamin, and taken off to Tripoli. The brothers were released a few days ago when the prison was liberated.

Above: Mohammed Bin Al Amin after his release: below, Elhabib Elamin.

libyan writers in exile & their support for the revolution

2011-08-26T16:08:00.006+01:00

Libyan writers at the London Book Fair April 2011: L to R Hisham Matar, Ghazi Gheblawi, Mohamed Mesrati, Giuma Bukleb, with the editor of Banipal magazine Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon

article from qantara.de 19 August 2011

Libyan writers in exile: In support of the uprising

Due to the well-nigh total oppression of cultural life during 42 years of Gaddafi's dictatorship, Libyan literature has for decades been produced abroad. But with the uprising, everything has changed for them, too. Susannah Tarbush reports

This is proving to be a momentous year not only for Libyan politics and history but also for the country's literature. Libyan poets and fiction writers, particularly those in exile, have emerged as some of the most eloquent and credible Libyan voices to be heard internationally in support of the uprising during its first six months.

They have been speaking out in a variety of forums – newspaper articles, radio and TV interviews, on the social media, at conferences and literary festivals.

Eyes have also been focused on their creative writing. The prizewinning London-based Libyan novelist Hisham Matar said at the London Book Fair in April: "If you want to know any country you read its poems and its novels; what literature gives you is not only the news of the place but the spirit of the place and the preoccupations of the place."

Certainly, readers have been turning to Matar's two novels, "In the Country of Men" and "Anatomy of a Disappearance", to try to deepen their understanding of Libya.

Literary production inspired by the uprising

"Literature conveys not only the news of the place but the spirit of the place": Hisham Matar has been living in London since 1986 The uprising has inspired some Libyan writers to produce new poems and fiction. They include the acclaimed award-winning poet and translator Khaled Mattawa who was born in Benghazi in 1964 and teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In his poem "Now that we have Tasted Hope", Mattawa conveys the defiance and aspirations of the revolution. It begins:

Now that we have tasted hope
Now that we have come out of hiding,
Why would we live again in the tombs we'd made out of our souls?

Mattawa has also written a series of beautifully crafted articles on the revolution for the international media.

The uprising has seen an interplay between writers inside and outside Libya. In areas of the country wrested from regime control, a multiplicity of voices is being heard. "There is a boom in civil society organisations all over free Libya," the Libyan surgeon, short-story writer, and award-winning blogger and podcaster Ghazi Gheblawi said in an interview with Qantara in London, where he lives. "A new association of journalists has been established, and a few weeks ago a new union for Libyan writers was founded in Benghazi. Writers in free Libya are involved in many new publications, with more focus on new literature."

Writers risking their lives

Gheblawi pays tribute to writers within Libya. "The amount of involvement of Libyan writers in the Libyan revolution inside Libya is tremendous," he says. "Many of them were involved before the revolution, many were vital in getting the truth to the outside world, and many have been detained, tortured and face horrors."..continued..

libyan historian: 'tony blair and gaddafi synonymous in the libyan psyche'

2011-08-14T09:32:00.011+01:00

In an interview in today's Independent on Sunday, headlined "Libya can't trust Blair says rebels' ambassador to UK", Libya's new ambassador in London Mahmud Nacua says the Libyan people are "not satisfied" with the closeness of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Colonel Gaddafi. In contrast he praises "courageous" Prime Minister David Cameron. He also criticises the Scottish government's release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

The interviewer Matt Chorley, political correspondent of the Indie on Sunday, writes: "The 74-year-old poet and academic, who has lived in the UK for 23 years, hopes to use his new ambassadorial role to rebuild relations between Britain and his homeland."

The interview put me in mind of comments made on the Blair-Gaddafi relationship by the three panellists at the event Britain and Libya: What Does the Future Hold? organised last month at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, by the Council for Arab British Understanding (CAABU).

The panellists were Libyan historian and writer Dr Faraj Najem, director of Studies and Academic Research at Grafton College of Management Sciences; former British Ambassador to Libya Sir Richard Dalton, now an associate fellow at Chatham House's Middle East and North Africa programme; and Professor George Joffe, professorial research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, research fellow at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, and research fellow and director at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Qatar.

During the Q&A session, the panellists were asked this question: Tony Blair likes to say “history will be my judge” – how is history going to judge Tony Blair and Libya, and then his successor and the whole Megrahi thing – isn’t this going to be the elephant in the room even after liberation, even after Britain's current military involvement in Libya?

The Libyan panellist saw things differently from his two co-panellists. Dr Najem said: "Tony Blair. Bless him. He’s a name synonymous with Gaddafi in the Libyan psyche... I would love to see him next to Gaddafi in the ICC (International Criminal Court) because he’s someone who is equally just as much a culprit as Gaddafi. He was the one who was instrumental in rehabilitating Gaddafi. It was a blemish on Western democracy, and particularly Britain, when Tony Blair went into the tent and embraced Gaddafi and kissed him on the cheek [in 2007]. How could you kiss someone like him? It just revolts you. But also to tell us that this is after all a tamed monster that we can do business with... I’d love to see Blair talking on the issue because he has been conspicuously absent from the whole thing because he knows he and his cronies were..."

When Sir Richard Dalton interjected: "I must be one of his [Blair's] cronies then!" Dr Najem said: "No, no, you are a civil servant so I will forgive you – I’m talking about the policy makers, Peter Mandelson and everyone else."

Sir Richard Dalton, who played a key role in the Libyan-British rapprochement when he was ambassador in 1999-2003, stoutly defended the British record of dealings with the Gaddafi regime. "Don’t over-emphasise Tony Blair’s role," he said. "The Libyans began the business of improving their international relationships in the mid-1990s and it’s possible to argue that they rehabilitated themselves through dealing successively with these 'legacy issues' – these were hot –button issues, whether it was assistance to the IRA, or supporting Abu Nidal, their attitude to Israel, you can see any number of cases where the Libyans have shifted their behaviour – it culminated, it didn’t start with, the British-American diplomatic effort to achieve the surrender of Libya’s embryonic nuclear weapons programme and associated material.

"So Tony Blair came very late to the game. We proceeded incredibly cautiously with Libya. We didn’t invite our ministers to go for three years after the resumption of diplomatic relations in 1999 and we didn’t send our Prime Minister until a further two years down the line. And many many years after our fellow Europeans had been sending their presidents and prime ministers in a queue to shake the dear leader’s hand.

"And that was because of the absence of a clear political consensus in the UK that we should rush into the embrace until we’d got a solid settlement of our disputes ... and on the whole that strategy worked. Now there is an argument that we shouldn’t have even have embarked on that, that this person [Gaddafi] is so far beyond the pale that we should simply eschew his country, but that would have been to betray a lot of solid British interests and that translates into jobs, yes, and security, yes, and furthermore it would be completely at odds with the policy we adopt internationally in general. International relations 101, as the Americans say, is that you have to deal with regimes which you fundamentally dislike and disapprove of. I can think of so many examples in my lifetime have borne this out, starting with the Soviet Union."

George Joffe said: I don’t really have very much to add – I can’t comment on Tony Blair because of my well known antipathy - but apart from that I do think we have to take what Sir Richard Dalton says seriously. Because actually Libya made a quite conscious set of policy decisions very early on, and I’d put them even earlier than the mid-1990s, I think they actually began in the late 1980s, that it had to rehabilitate its relationships – and it had to find ways of doing it.

"The regime demonstrated a quite remarkable opportunism in the way in which it did that. And so in a way I think Mr Blair came on the coattails of that – the fact that the manifestation of his interest was not the most appealing is perhaps not surprising. If you looking for an area in which he had a direct effect on policy it’s not so much in Libya case, it’s in the case of Iraq – and that’s the really crucial thing, if you’re looking for a reason to blame him as an individual that’s what you can blame him for. But again I have to say you know arguing politics simply in terms of personalities is a little dangerous so I think we need to look at the Libyan case really in the round to understand what really happened."

hisham matar's anatomy of a disappearance goes international

2011-08-13T08:34:00.009+01:00

There was disappointment and surprise in some quarters when Libyan novelist Hisham Matar's second novel Anatomy of a Disappearance did not make the Man Booker longlist of 13 novels announced on 26 July. See for example the take of reviewer and critic Suzi Feay who includes Anatomy of a Disappearance on her personal longlist. Matar's debut novel In the Country of Men caused a major stir in 2006 when it was shortlisted for the prize, and it has received a surge of new interest during the Libyan uprising for its compelling and subtle portrait of the Gaddafi police state in Tripoli in 1979. It won several major literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Award for the Best First Book, Europe and South Asia Region, and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for the book that best evokes the spirit of a place. It has been translated into nearly 30 languages.
In the Country of Men is the focus of a forthcoming edition of the BBC World Service's World Book Club. The programme is due to be recorded on 24 August at the World Service's Bush House headquarters in central London. Matar will be talking about the novel in front of a live audience; questions can be emailed to worldbookclub@bbc.co.uk

Anatomy of a Disappearance has received much praise and generally, though not uniformly, highly favourable reviews - certainly better than some of the titles that made the longlist. But waht would a Man Booker longlist or shortlist be if it did not cause ripples, and complaints that a particular hotly tipped favourite was not selected.

When the BBC presenter Rosie Goldsmith interviewed Matar for last month's London Literature Festival she enthused about his “absolutely wonderful” second book. “It's been heaped with praise and I can only heap it with even more praise," she said. "It is superb. It is also the most wonderful page turner. It’s a short book but it’s quite epic and grand in its ambition. It is also very erotic: the whole book is saturated with a kind of suppressed sex and emotion.”

Anatomy of a Disappearance is now beginning to appear in other territories and langauges following its debut UK publication [pictured centre] by Penguin imprint Viking on March 3. The German edition, translated by Werner Löcher-Lawrence, is published by the Random House imprint Luchterhand Literaturverlag under the title Geschichte eines Verschwindens. Another Random House imprint The Dial Press publishes the US version on 23 August.
It's interesting to compare the covers of a novel in different editions and languages - I recall the Jordanian-British novelist Fadia Faqir writing on this in her article A Dalek in a Burqa published by Qantara.de
What to make of the garment on the cover of the US edition? One of the most striking images in the novel is the narrator's first sight of Egyptian-British Mona (for whom the narrator falls as a young teenager, and whom his father marries) at the swimming pool of a hotel in Alexandria wearing "an outrageoulsy bright yellow swimsuit that made her skin seem darker, her age younger." The cover of the US edition has a part-Edwardian part-Japanese effect.

Hisham's London-based literary agent AP Watt says that other editions agreed so far are Canada (Hamish Hamilton, a Penguin imprint); Arabic (Dar El Shorouk, Cairo); Danish (Gyldendal); Dutch (JM Meulenhoff); Finnish (Söderström); French (Denoël); Hebrew (Keter); Italian (Einaudi); Norwegian (Cappelen Damm); Polish (Smak Slowa); Portuguese - Brazil (Record) - Portugal (Civilizacao); Spanish (Salamandra); Swedish (Forum); Turkish (Pegasus).

Hisham appears with Egyptian-British novelist and essayist Ahdaf Soueif and BBC special correspondent Allan Little at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 26 August, at an event titled Revolution in the 21st Century: North Africa. On 29 August he is in conversation with Kirsty Lang, presenter of BBC Radio 4's cultural daily slot Front Row, at the inaugural Voewood Festival ("the literary garden party of the year" - other participants include the legendary Diana Athill) near Holt in Norfolk. He travels to Italy in September for the Mantova literary festival. He's due to appear at the Jaipur Festival in January and is likely also to appear at the Emirates Airline Festival in Dubai in March.

Hisham is an associate professor at women's liberal arts college Barnard College, New York, an affiliated college of Columbia University, where he will be teaching a new course in the fall: Estrangement and Exile in Global Novels.

waguih ghali's bbc talk on visit to israel post-1967 war

2011-08-08T16:32:00.004+01:00

One for Waguih Ghali completists – a battered copy of Good Talk: An Anthology from BBC Radio (Victor Gollancz, 1968). The volume includes the BBC Radio talk “An Egyptian in Israel” that the author of the novel Beer in the Snooker Club gave after his visit to Israel, post-June 1967 war. Ghali speaks of how his trip drastically changed his attitude towards Israel: “...whereas my pleas for understanding were previously directed towards the Arabs, I now feel that Israel is very much more to blame than the Arabs for the state of belligerency that exists in the Middle East.”

The volume is edited by the distinguished writer and editor Derwent May. At that time May was Literary Editor of The Listener – the celebrated highbrow BBC weekly that ran from 1929-91. Ghali is in excellent company: among the other contributors to the anthology are A J Ayer, Ted Hughes, Max Beloff, René Cutforth, Robert Gittings, Sir Bernard Lovell, Christopher Sykes and Magnus Pyke.

In his foreword, May writes that the talks and discussions in the volume had all been broadcast in the previous year or two on BBC Radio 4 (“previously the Home Service” – the change had only recently been made) or the Third Programme (which would in 1970 become BBC Radio 3).

May hoped that, for all their variety, “they each display a style and a kind of curiosity of mind that will please any reader who likes authentic reports on the state of the world in which we live.”

The book is divided into five sections: people, problems, places, imagination and fact. Ghali’s talk comes under “problems”; some of the other entries in this section are A J Ayer interviewed by Robert Kee and Olivier Todd on “What Are Philosophers For?”, Max Beloff on “The Americanisation of British Intellectual Life” and David Martin, a sociology reader at LSE, on “Trouble in the Universities”.

Waguih Ghali died in hospital in the first days of January 1969 ten days after taking a massive overdose of sleeping pills on Boxing Day, December 26. He had at the time been living in the flat of his editor, and briefly lover, Diana Athill.

In her memoir of Ghali, After a Funeral, Athill describes how a married friend whom adored and for whom he had developed a “pure love” helped Ghali “to the one practical achievement of his last years. She was able to give him the necessary introductions and wise advice on how to use them when he decided to visit Israel after the Six Day War.”

Athill records that both the Times and the Observer newspapers were ready to put up money for Ghali’s journey to Israel against articles which he would write when there, or after he came back. There was a “larky” last evening before his trip, at the end of which euphoria prevailed. “This, he was sure, was the beginning of great things.” Even though his advances from the newspapers would be swallowed up by the cost of the trip, if he sent back good stories other work would be bound to follow: “he would become established as an expert on the Middle East.”

Athill writes about how Ghali proved himself with the articles he wrote about his trip. She does not however mention a BBC talk.

The contributor’s note on Ghali in his six-page chapter of Good Talk reads: “Waguih Ghali is an Egyptian living in London. He is the author of an ironical novel about Egypt called Beer in the Snooker Club”.

Ghali begins his talk by saying that he managed to get a visa to Israel because of this novel “In which I made a plea for peace with Israel and tried to remind the Egyptians of the sufferings the Jews had experienced in Germany and in Eastern Europe. I depicted the corruptness of the Egyptian army officer class – our new elite. As a result I fell foul of the Egyptian government.”

Beer in the Snooker Club was “well received in Israel; it was translated into Hebrew and read by many people there. I mention all this to demonstrate my attitude towards Israel before the June war and before I visited that country myself.”

But “as a result of this visit, my attitude towards Israel changed drastically. I am still very much in favour of an understanding between the Arabs and Israel. But whereas my pleas for understanding were previously directed towards the Arabs, I now feel that Israel is very much more to blame than the Arabs for the state of belligerency that exists in the Middle East.

“This change of attitude on my part has not come about through reading books or delving into political and geographical sophistries, but through friendly and informal conversations with Israelis when I was in their country. The more I spoke to the ‘top” people, the policy makers, the less I felt that there is a chance for peace between us.”

Towards the end of his talks he says: “I was often asked by Israelis: ‘What should we do to have peace with the Arabs? ‘ My answer has been, and still is, to support the progressive movements in the Middle East. To tell the Arabs: ‘We are not the tools for imperialist designs on the Arab world.’ To acknowledge that the 1956 Suez war was the greatest mistakes they made – because it shook many Arabs like myself who were not anti-Israeli. The Israelis seem to remember the past only when it is to their advantage.”

Ghali pinned much hope on the Oriental Jews.

In his conclusion he says : “Although the Arabs seem to have begun to be more realistic about Israel, as they showed in Khartoum recently by listening to Bourguiba’s advice rather than Shukairy’s, I feel that real peace can come only is Israeli really wills it. I can see this ‘will for peace’ coming about only when and if the government of Israel is composed of Israelis who feel an affinity with the Arabs, and not with the West. There are many such Israelis, but they are oriental Jews or Separidim, and have no political power. After all most of the political parties are financed by Zionist movements in the West and are therefore pro-Western; If there is, at the moment, a government in Israel which really wants peace, the first thing it should do, in my opinion would be to evacuate its side of the Suez canal and to stop humiliating the Egyptians by their presence there. Furthermore, it must acknowledge former Palestinians as countrymen with equal rights."

Would the BBC allow the broadcasting of an opinion piece with such frank criticism of Israel today? One thinks not (see review of More Bad News from Israel by Professor Greg Philo and Mike Barry, an analysis of BBC and other media coverage of Israel-Palestine).

royal court theatre to present plays inspired by arab spring

2011-07-23T11:23:00.006+01:00

One of Britain’s most prominent Arab writers, the Iraqi playwright and scientist Dr Hassan Abdulrazzak [pictured below], was in the audience at last Thursday’s discussion “The Arab Spring: A literary perspective” held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University.

Abdulrazzak used the occasion to publicise ‘After the Spring: New Short Plays from the Arab World’ to be held at the Royal Court Theatre on 11 and 12 August, in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. He has translated one of the plays into English – “Voluntary Work” by Egyptian theatre director and playwright Leila Solman.

The SOAS event was part of the Shubbak festival, London’s first-ever celebration of contemporary Arab culture. It was organised by the Arab British Centre, in collaboration with Banipal magazine and the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).

The three writers on the panel were Khaled al-Berry of Egypt, Giuma Bukleb of Libya and Ghalia Kabbani of Syria. The event was chaired by the author Brian Whitaker, an editor of the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free (CIF) section and former Guardian Middle East editor

Abdulrazzak made his intervention from the audience when the panel discussion turned to the possible impact of the Arab Spring on censorship and self-censorship. He cited Soliman’s play as an example of how the Arab Spring and use of social media may be easing self-censorship.

He did not refer to Soliman by name, but said of the Egyptian play he has translated “the young lady who wrote it is an activist and blogger. I was given a play by her before, and it was self censoring, but this one is very direct. It attacks the army and what it is doing right now, and the imprisonments.”

He wondered whether this will now “be the way” of writing with young people having got used to expressing themselves on Facebook and so on during the Arab uprisings. “Will this translate into literature?” he asked.

In addition to Soliman’s play, the ‘After the Spring’ programme, directed by Simon Goodwin, features plays by Mohammad Al Attar of Syria, Kamal Khalladi from Morocco, and Arzé Khodr from Lebanon. There is additional material from Elyes Labidi of Tunisia.

‘After the Spring’ is part of the Royal Court’s Rough Cuts season of work in progress , experimental pieces, readings and shorts to be held from 9 to 20 August. It is a new phase of the project the Royal Court first launched in Spring 2007, in collaboration with the British Council, to encourage the writing of plays by young authors from across the Arab world.

As a first step 21 writers from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Syria - three writers per country - were invited to Damascus in April 2007. There they worked with Elyse Dodgson and with playwrights David Greig and April De Angelis.

A second session was held in Tunis in November 2008 and a third phase in Cairo in March 2008 under the Royal Court’s artistic director Dominic Cooke.

Rehearsed readings of plays were held at the Royal Court in November 2008 in the "I Come from There: New Plays from the Arab World” season in November 2008. Seven Arab writers were involved, and the season including a panel discussion with the writers chaired by David Greig.

Abdulrazzak translated the play “603” by Palestinian writer and actor Imad Farajin for ‘I Come from There’. His translation was published by Nick Hern Books in the collection “Plays from the Arab World” edited by Elyse Dodgson. The other plays in the volume are “Damage” by Kamal Khalladi, “The House” by Arzé Khodr, “Egyptian Products” by Laila Soliman and “Withdrawal” by Mohammad Al Attar.

In Spring 2009 there were readings of the plays with local directors in Amman, Beirut and Tunis. Some of the plays have had full productions in various locations in the Arab region.

Abdulrazzak combines his writing career with his work researching stem cells at London’s Imperial College. He made his playwriting debut with the multiple award-wining “Baghdad Wedding” staged at the Soho Theatre. It was subsequently broadcast as a BBC Radio 3 play in 2008. Since then several of his short plays have been staged. He also writes poems, short stories and monologues.

when diana met waguih... waguih ghali and diana athill

2011-07-21T12:04:00.005+01:00

2011-07-17T22:17:00.004+01:00

Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2011, reads from her prizewinning story Hitting Budapest at the London Literature Festival last Sunday during an evening of readings and interviews with the shortlistees.

Lauri Kubuitsile of Botswana discusses her entertaining shortlisted story In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata with compere of the evening, the Ghanaian poet and writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes.

David Medalie of South Africa reads from his story The Mistress’s Dog.

libyan novelist ahmed fagih & 'homeless rats' in english translation

2011-07-17T17:41:00.005+01:00

Libyan novelist Ahmed Fagih with a copy of his novel Homeless Rats hot off the press from Quartet Books of London, in English translation by Dr Sorayya Allam. Quartet's Palestinian chairman Naim Attallah has been tweeting enthusiastically about the novel, saying that it is "receiving tumultuous praise from those who bought early copies...it will receive a literary prize" and that it "will be heavily marketed in September. Be the first to read this exciting novel." The one review to appear so far on amazon.co.uk is most positive and gives a five-star rating. It compares the novel to Richard Adams' highly successful 1972 epic rabbit fantasy Watership Down, the film of which was released in 1978. Of course the real test of the novel will come when it is the hands of readers and reviewers.

bqfp publishes tweets from tahrir

2011-07-17T09:52:00.003+01:00

Tweeting the Tahrir revolution

On February 7 the Egyptian tweeter and blogger Sandmonkey (actually 29-year-old Mahmoud Salem) tweeted: “A revolution organized by facebook, spread by twitter and organized by a guy working for Google. I LOVE OUR REVOLUTION.”

Sandmonkey issued his tweet on the day Google executive and internet activist Wael Ghonim (30) was released after 11 days of being held blindfolded in detention. Ghonim had been seized on the day after the uprising started. His detention had led to a vigorous campaign in Egypt and beyond demanding his release.

On his release Ghonim gave an emotional interview to Dream TV, which made a considerable impact. It emerged that he had been among the anonymous administrators of the Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said”.

The page was set up in memory of a young man who was publicly beaten to death by police in Alexandria June 2010. He was reportedly targeted because he had recorded on video evidence of police involvement in a drug deal. The “We are All Khaled Said” page became a vital engine of the revolution when it circulated calls for the first demonstrations.

Certainly the social media has played a vital part in the revolution. A fascinating record of the use of Twitter is provided by the book “Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People who Made It”, edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns.

The book is published in the Middle East and North Africa by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP). Its editors are young activists based in Britain. Nadia Idle, who is half-Egyptian half-English, is the Activism and Outreach officer at the anti-poverty charity War on Want. Two weeks into revolution she decided she must fly out to Cairo and join the action. Alex Nunns is a writer, campaigner, musician and political editor of Red Pepper magazine.

The foreword is by Egyptian-British novelist and essayist Ahdaf Soueif, who was in Tahrir Square during the revolution. “Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way it did,” Soueif writes. “The causes of the revolution were many; deep-rooted and long seated. The turning moment had come – but it was the instant and widespread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognize the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation.”

Twitter, with its real-time messages of up to 140 characters, was citizen journalism at its most immediate and rawest. Idle and Nunns aim to present a “readable, fast-paced account of the Revolution that gives a sense of what was being said on Twitter.”

The tweets are displayed eight to a page, in chronological order. The narrative also includes some of the photographs circulated by tweeters, including several by the journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy who tweets under the name 3arabawy.

The editors have left the tweets just as they were, complete with misspellings, swear words, and imperfect grammar. The stream of tweets adds up to a cumulatively powerful and moving testimony. The courage, spirit and good humor of people persisting in the face of violence and authoritarianism, sometimes putting their lives on the line, is awe-inspiring.

The book’s 21 chapters are arranged chronologically, each introduced by a summary of the main events covered by the tweets in that chapter. The first chapter, “The Spark”, covers the period between January 14 – the day Ben Ali left Tunisia – and January 25, the Day of Revolt. The first tweet was sent by Gsquare86 (the Twitter name of Gigi Ibrahim) on January 14: “the Tunisian revolution is being twitterized...history is being written by the people!”

Each chapter that follows covers a day, from January 25, the National Police Day holiday, when demonstrations were called across Egypt, up to February 11 when Mubarak resigned, and February 12 when the people embarked on an impressive cleaning up of Tahrir Square. After the news of Mubarak’s resignation ManarMohsen tweeted: “Who did this? WE did, the people. Without guns. Without violence. Rather, with principles and persistence. Mabrouk, everyone!”

The hashtag #jan25 was used throughout to identify tweets related to the revolution and is still used today, for example in relation to the fresh protests in Tahrir Square. The book’s epilogue has tweets from the revolts inspired elsewhere in the Arab world after the baton of revolution passed from Tunisia to Egypt.

On January 28, the Day of Rage, the internet was blocked when the government ordered internet service providers and mobile phone operators to shut down. The editors recount the events of that particularly violent day, on which hundreds of people died across Egypt.

The absence of tweets due to the internet shut down of that day is represented effectively by two black pages. Although the internet remained shut down for four more days, some tweeters found ways to skirt round the blockade and got online.

The tweets vividly recreate the events and mood of the revolution. On January 25 ashrafkhalil tweeted that “police and protesters in tahrir all gagging on tear gas”. On Bloody Wednesday, February 2, the security forces were remobilized in plain clothes and were joined by thugs paid to attack demonstrators. There was the notorious cavalry charge of thugs charging through the crowds on horses and camels and attacking people with whips. Monasosh (Mona Seif) tweeted: “Cut wounds, fractures, rupture eyes. Weapons used glass, coke bottles, knives, swords.”

The authors make no claim that their compilation of tweets is comprehensive. “To print every tweet that related to the uprising would take several volumes,” they point out. “One activist alone managed to tweet 60,000 words during the revolution!”

In selecting tweets to tell the story of the revolution the editors decided to use only English-language tweets “for logistical and stylistic reasons”. This means that some popular tweeters who write in Arabic, such as Wael Abbas, are excluded.

The editors acknowledge that one reason English was so commonly used by Tweeters is that those who have laptops and smartphones tend to be the more affluent members of society, among whom the use of English is quite widespread. They stress that on the ground the tweeters were just part of a far wider movement that included the urban poor.

Numerous tweeters are represented in the book, but some “core tweeters” appear with particular frequency. Among them are Sandmonkey; tarekshalaby; Gsquare86; ManarMohsen; 3arabawy; adamakary (Adam Makary); and ashrafkhalil.

Humor is a constant feature of the #jan25 Twitter stream. There is a tweet from a spoof HosniMobarak Twitter account on January 26: “I blocked Twitter and Facebook so you could focus on your work, not run around the streets shouting.” The final tweet in the book, dated February 13, is from the same account: “You people are hypocrites! You talk about democracy, but you won’t let me run for president? Where’s the freedom?! #VoteHosni.”

The Egyptian revolution is an evolving story, and will remain so for a long time. The editors end their book with the words “Not the End”. And on Twitter one can daily witness Egyptian history continuing to unfold in real time as in the violent protests in Tahrir Square in recent days. There is clearly scope for follow-up editions of “Tweets from Tahrir”.
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 3 July 2011

raja alem & mohammed achaari at london literature festival

2011-07-11T19:16:00.013+01:00

IPAF winners Raja Alem and Mohammed Achaari in joint appearance at London Literature Festival

Speaking about her prizewinning novel “The Doves’ Necklace” at the London Literature Festival (LFF) last Saturday, the Saudi novelist Raja Alem said: “When I look at ‘The Doves’ Necklace’ I feel as if I have taken a whole generation to a therapist and allowed it to express how it felt growing up in Mecca in the 70s or 60s, or my aunts’ generation.”

Her characters express their agonies growing up in this inward-looking place insulated from the outside world. “How could a person coming from this background get exposed to the 21st century? This shock is in my book.”

In mid-March “The Doves’ Necklace” and Moroccan writer Mohammed Achaari’s book “The Arch and the Butterfly” were declared joint winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). The award marked several firsts for IPAF: the first time in its four-year history that the prize had been awarded jointly; the first time a woman had won it, and the first time it had gone to a Moroccan. The joint award was good news for the publisher of both winning novels, al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi of Casablanca and Beirut.

Mecca-born Alem is a prolific author and the winner of several major Arab writing awards. She has written four plays and ten published novels (two of them written in English with Tom McDonough) and has collaborated with artists on several art books.

Raja and her artist Shadia Alem co-founded a women's cultural and recreation centre in Mecca, and have a creative collaboration unique on the Saudi and Arab arts scene. Their installation The Black Arch was chosen as the exhibit for the first-ever independent Saudi pavilion at the Venice Biennale in June.

Achaari is the author of ten books of poetry published since the early 1970s and a short story collection. "The Arch and the Butterfly" is his second published novel. Twice elected head of the Moroccan Writers' Union, his political activism led to his imprisonment in the early 1980s. More recently he has served as Morocco's Cultural and Communications Minister and as an MP.

The LLF event was the first-ever joint public reading by Alem and Achaari of excerpts from their winning novels. The author and broadcaster Paul Blezard chaired the session and interviewed the authors.

The event was held in a suite high up in the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank arts complex. The authors sat with Blezard on a stage against a dramatic backdrop of the slowly turning London Eye big wheel, a huge inflatable purple cow lying on its back and, across the River Thames, the Houses of Parliament.

In addition to being an LLF event, the session came under the umbrella of the Shubbak Festival, London’s first-ever celebration of contemporary Arab culture which began on 4 July and runs until 24 July.

The 126-page IPAF book ”Excerpts from the Shortlist 2011”, distributed free to those attending the event and signed by the authors at the end, proved invaluable. The book contains biographical information, photographs and extracts from the novels of the six shortlisted authors in Arabic and in English translation.

Alem and Achaari read the excerpts from their work in the original Arabic, and Blezard then read the English translations. Even those members of the audience who did not know Arabic appreciated the chance to listen to the authors reading; in the Q&A session afterwards one attendee said how struck she was by the evident poetry and musicality of the language.

In the interviews Alem responded to Blezard’s questions in English while Achaari spoke in Arabic, with translation into English by IPAF board member Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Massih. Abdel-Massih is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC), and is currently on secondment to the University of Kuwait.

IPAF was launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007. It is funded by the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy and run with the support of Booker Foundation located in London: it is often dubbed “the Arabic Booker”. The prize is worth $50,000, plus the $10,000 that each shortlisted author receives.

Blezard introduced the session with a reading from the introduction to “Excerpts from the Shortlist 2011” by the Chair of this year’s IPAF 2011 judges, Iraqi poet and novelist Fadhil al-Azzawi.

Al-Azzawi describes the huge number of new Arab novels published every year in almost all Arab countries as a “not only new but astonishing phenomenon.” Traditionally poets played a dominant role in Arab literature “but in the last two or three years something happened that has turned the Arab literary scene upside down.”

Al-Azzawi attributes the change to the influence of IPAF: “the ‘fever of writing novels ‘has caught everyone in the Arab world. Even poets and critics are now trying their luck in writing novels...”

He ended: “Good literature expels evil spirits. It gives us wings to fly and makes us freemen and women.”

“The Arch and the Butterfly” tackles the themes of Islamic extremism and terrorism from a new angle. A left-wing father who believes his son is studying in Paris is told by Al-Qaeda in a letter that the son has died as a martyr in Afghanistan. The novel examines the impact of this shocking news on the man’s life and on his relationship with his wife.

“The Doves’ Necklace” is set in Alem’s home town, the holy city of Mecca. Al-Azzawi writes that the novel “enchants us with an unprecedented account of the holy city Mecca. Behind the city’s sacred facade there is another, hidden, world full of prostitutes, thieves, killers, terrorists, sex maniacs and poor foreign workers who have lost all hope.” This harsh environment is set against with the beauty of the love letters the book’s central character Aisha writes to her German boyfriend.

Alem explained to the LLF audience that the title of her novel alludes to “The Dove’s Necklace” by the philosopher Ibn Hazm, a philosopher who lived in Andalusia during the glory of Arab rule in Spain. His book “is about love: how love is the answer to the problems of the world. Love starts as a game but it ends up serious.”

By coincidence the excerpt from Achaari’s novel refers to Ibn Hazm’s great work. After receiving the letter about his son’s death the father experiences profound upheavals, one of which involves writing a series of “Letters to my Love”, published first in the newspaper he works for and then in book form. A critic describes them as the most important work on love since “The Dove’s Necklace”. A footnote in the English translation explains the reference to the book by Ibn Hazm (994-1064 CE).

As a tribute to Alem, when reading the excerpt from his novel in Arabic Achaari replaced the title of Ibn Hazm’s book “Tawq al-Hamama” in which “dove” is singular, with “Tawq al-Hamam” the title of Raja’s book, in which the plural is used. Raja smiled and touched Mohammed gently on the shoulder as he read the alterered title in his text; at Blezard's request, Abdel-Massih explained to the audience the reason for Raja's gesture.

Asked about the role of the novel in contemporary Arabic literature, Alem said the novel is the best way to know about Arab countries and to “reach inside each other”. Literature not only gives us wings, to use Azzawi’s phrase, but “gives us insight into each other. When I read Mohammed’s book it gives me insight into a world that is remote from me.” Regarding her novel, “if I didn’t write this novel probably nobody would know anything about Mecca because it is a mysterious world.”

Achaari was previously known primarily as a poet. Asked what a novel can do that poetry cannot do, Achaari said that the novel is important for him as a poet because it allows him “a new dimension of addressing people – how to evoke their imagination and change their insights and their orientations.”

He said that he and Raja are very interested in presenting through their novels “the reality people are living today. This was not the case with the early Arabic novel which was written for history or had more interest in past history and superficial realism. Both of us meant to present a new form of the novel and we also wanted to give a representation of today’s present not just deal with our Arab heritage.”

Alem said she felt a sense of responsibility when she writes about Mecca and introduces the people in her book to readers. Blezard asked whether this sense of responsibility was towards the people about whom she is writing, or her readers. Raja said it was to both: “When I write about my people it’s as if I am exposing them, the way I see them, because I have an insight inside those people. And when I introduce them I expect to be responsible in front of readers because I’m allowing them to see how we think.”

Blezard asked about the reception of novels among audiences who “don’t have this background of being brought up with the novel, being more used to poetry.”

Achaari said the novel form is very well accepted by the public, “who are really fed up with repetitive forms, easy reading, and are now looking forward to read books that respect their intelligence, that are not familiar. Maybe we are able to present something that answers the reader’s expectations.” He added as proof that his novel was very well received the fact that it was published three times in one year.

Blezard asked Alem whether she has a freedom in constructing her novels that Western authors perhaps don’t have. “Actually you’ve got a green field out there that you can do whatever you want with,” he suggested. “It doesn’t have to fit within the niche publishing that we have in a highly evolved Western culture.”

Raja replied: “Yes. My reference when I write is the Western novel but I’m influenced by old Arabic books such as ‘Al-Hayawan’ by Jahiz. It’s like the way ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ was written – it evolves, it starts from a little seed and goes up and up building up the story. I came from this tradition, added to the Western way of writing – so I never felt that I am restricted when I am writing, although I am coming from Saudi Arabia.”

Raja said of her novel: “I’d like to note that in the beginning I wrote it in English, in a way to have a foreign eye looking at our life because when I am writing Arabic, it is like there is an Arabic eye or an eye which has a censorship built in. I didn’t want to see my life with that eye, I wanted to see it as a foreigner at the beginning to explore what is around me. So I wrote it in English to feel freer writing it – then I translated it into Arabic, using the skills I had in Arabic to refine it. So I felt totally free when I wrote ‘The Doves’ Necklace’”.

Blezard asked Achaari whether he recognised Alem’s assertion that in writing with an Arabic eye there is a self-censorship built in.

Achaari said he had written the novel through his own eye not the Arab eye. “If you read the book you will find out that I did not subject myself to any internal or external censorship – on the contrary, I dealt with private and public issues, I dealt with love, I dealt with corruption both social and political. You must be aware that now many changes have taken place in the Arab world and even censorship is much less than before.” He believes that it is “not only the author that has to be free from internal and external censorship, but also the reader as well has to really exert an effort for that.”

Blezer asked the two writers what winning IPAF meant to them. Alem said: “I write as I breathe, every morning I wake up and start writing, reading – it’s my life. I never looked back at what I wrote or counted what I did – I wrote many books.” But when she won the Arabic Booker “I suddenly looked back – I saw this heap [of books], this curve - imagine me a girl from Mecca where announcing your name is a shame and I’m here, it’s a big curve.

“When I look at this curve and I see it not with my eye but with the eye of girls there in Mecca it’s possible, everything in life is possible, it’s what you make of your life. You cannot say ‘I’m born in this country or that country, I’m oppressed, I’m so and so’ – no, it’s not where you are, it’s what you are. And the Booker made me realise this.”

For Achaari a main benefit of the prize is that it enables a novel written in a language, Arabic, that has only a limited readership to generate much interest and to be read in other languages.

“The Arch and the Butterfly” talks of Islamic extremism and terrorism from a new angle, Blezard said. How was it received when published in Arabic?

Achaari explained that his novel is not simply about terrorism but is about a person who receives a letter that his son who had been studying in France has been killed while involved with the Taliban. “For this person everything is shattered, and he even lost his sense of smell, and that’s why he starts recalling stories about his life, about his father, about his German mother, about his lover, and he starts to reconstruct his story through these other stories.”

The novel is “not really about terrorism, it’s about the violence which we have to put up with in the Arab countries. For us when we hear about for instance a terrorist act in the West we always as Arabs think of it as something that is external to us, something that isn’t linked to us, that we are not terrorists. But actually we are living terrorism inside our Arab countries and when something affects us the whole view of violence and terrorism changes.”

The authors were asked whether they were aware of the poetry in their prose and whether they put it there on purpose or whether it is a natural way of writing prose given the poetic tradition of Arabic writing.

Achaari made a distinction between musicality and the poetic “because the importance when writing is working with language, manipulating language ,creating a new aesthetic, and this for me is poetry, this is for me the poetic. Not sonority in a sense. I am basically a poet, I have published ten poetry books, and perhaps this has its impact.”

Alem said: “Your style is like your fingerprint: you don’t choose it. When I started writing in Arabic people said it is as if I am possessed by an ancient seeress who’s speaking through me. I didn’t learn this language in school, I didn’t learn it anywhere. If there is a sense of Sufism, a sense of poetry in my books I didn’t choose it and I wrote in English to escape this because it’s complex language. So when I write in English I want to escape this. .. and I wanted to master the novel.” But – “after all I think we Arabs when we write novels cannot escape the musicality or the poetry.”

She added that “when you read my books in Arabic they are really complex they are like something you read on a cave wall written by somebody who extends from past generations. I don’t know where it came from but it’s beautiful but in a way sometimes you want to get away from yourself and write differently.... maybe this is what I’m doing.”

On the question of whether novelists can build cultural bridges, Achaari said “if Western readers are able to understand us better through our novels this means that novels can set networks of communication... and open windows to our culture. I wish this could be realised.”

He hoped that schools and universities in the West would open up to contemporary Arabic literature. “Paradoxically enough French contemporary mainstream and avant garde literature is taught in Maghrebi schools but not contemporary Maghrebi writers and literatures.”

The information on the prize published in the IPAF book of excerpts says: “translation into English is assured for the winner”. Achaari’s novel is being translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid and is due to be publishedby Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in September 2012.

Alem’s novel is represented by the London-based literary agency Andrew Nurnberg Associates, which also handles two other IPAF winners, both Egyptian – Bahaa Taher and Yousef Ziedan.

According to Andrew Nurnberg Associates “The Doves’ Necklace” is currently on submission with publishers in the UK and US, and several are interested. There is no deal in the offing just yet, though the agency is hoping for one shortly. Although Alem originally wrote the novel in English, the plan is to retranslate her polished Arabic version back into a fresh, fluent English version, and it is expected IPAF will sponsor this once there is a publisher on board, as one of the conditions of the prize.

The agency has already sold “The Doves’ Necklace” to Editions Stock in France and Unions Verlag in Germany. The novel has also sold to Marsilio Publishers in Italy via Alem’s Italian agent, Maria Cristina Guerra.

Alem asserted that had her novel been about the Arab Spring, it would have been translated immediately into English given that the Arab Spring is in fashion. She recalled a man in Tahrir Square tearing at his clothes and declaring “What is this life? – I am going to die in Tahrir Square. The characters in my book are all saying the same. They are in Midan Tahrir in a way."

The opening section of her novel is narrated by an alley named Abu al-Roos. “Abu al-Roos is in a way my Midan Tahrir, where the characters are fighting” she said. One of the characters, Youssef, “spent his life defending history and defending the past, while he doesn’t have a present”. The girls in the book “took a lead, and they are doing something I couldn’t imagine myself doing.”

As for the son of an Imam, who is supposed to follow his father and become an Imam himself, “he stays working as a photographer, enlarging photos of the surroundings in order to understand what’s going on.”

Susannah Tarbush