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...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. We give the answer to the question fromEpisode 82: “The Men Who...

Mona Kareem’s essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” lit up debates among translators and poets. In this episode Kareem talks about poetry, the power dynamics...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. We give the answer to the question from Episode 81, “Naguib Mahfouz’s...

Two very different Egyptian novels – Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s The Men Who Swallowed the Sun and Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping – both circle around issues of migration in different ways....

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from...

What was so controversial aboutChildren of the Alley, leading to it beingbanned for years in Egypt and to an attempt on the author’s life? How and when was it...