Stories Just Sprout Inside You
An Interview with Maria Dadouch, who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature this year. Dadouch’s book The Mystery of the Glass ball features two children becoming...
BULAQ is a podcast about contemporary writing from and about the Middle East and North Africa. We talk about books written in Aleppo, Cairo, Marrakech and beyond. We look at the Arab region through the lens of literature, and we look at literature -- what it does, why it matters, how it relates to society and history and politics -- from the point of view of this part of the world. BULAQ is hosted by Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey and co-produced by Sowt.
An Interview with Maria Dadouch, who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature this year. Dadouch’s book The Mystery of the Glass ball features two children becoming...
Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com. The first listener to respond with the right answer will get a book in the mail!
Guest hosts Rafael (age 11) and Milo (almost 10) take over this episode of Bulaq to talk about the evil aunts, time-traveling djinn, and scary checkpoints in the first...
Another of our short book-quiz episodes. One of our astute listeners has given the answer to last week’s question: What Koranic and Biblical story is a reference for Abdulrazak...
Translator Alexander E. Elinson joins us to discuss Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc, a sprawling satire of contemporary Morocco. The novel, set in Marrakesh and online, follows the story of...
Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Here we give the answer to a question about an island that was part of a Sultanate spanning Oman and East Africa, and...
Paradise, by 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, is the coming-of-age story of Yusuf, a Tanzanian boy sent into debt servitude when his father can’t pay back an Arab...
Another of our short book-quiz episodes. Here we give the answer to a question about an Arab poet who emigrated to the US and translated some of the Beat...
Jokha Alharthi burst to sudden international literary stardom in 2019, when her second novel, Sayyidat al-Qamr (tr. Marilyn Booth as Celestial Bodies), won the International Booker. The novel, touted...