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Chadian Author Wins 2026 Bait AlGhasham DarArab Prize

Chadian Author Wins 2026 Bait AlGhasham DarArab Prize

News /
Organizers of the Bait AlGhasham DarArab Prize today announced 2026's winning works in three categories: Authors, Translators, and Omani Publications ...

From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’

From 'My Butterfly That Does Not Die'
Gaza, Poetry /
Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.” ...

On Finding Community Through Adabiyat

On Finding Community Through Adabiyat
Nonfiction /
Adabiyat is a virtual book club for readers of Arabic literature to come together monthly and debate, interpret, and appreciate written works of the Arab world and its diaspora. Houcine Chraïbi is a member of this club and writes of how his enlightening experiences during meetings and the welcoming energy of the Adabiyat community has rekindled his relationship with reading and enriched his life. ...

Fiction

Part Two, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’

Part Two, Emile Habiby's 'The Six-Day Sextet'

Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 16, 2026.

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Part One, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’

Part One, Emile Habiby's 'The Six-Day Sextet'

Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 9, 2026.

...

New Short Fiction from Kuwait: ‘The Phone Call’

New Short Fiction from Kuwait: 'The Phone Call'

In this short fiction from Kuwait, the central character and his author are in a standoff over a telephone call.

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Poetry

From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’

From 'My Butterfly That Does Not Die'

Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”

...

‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah

'A New Year in Gaza': By Ibrahim Nasrallah

The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.

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Three Poems by Nima Hasan

Three Poems by Nima Hasan

“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”

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Interviews

On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Will Tamplin has devoted much of his work in translation to sharing the literary world of the exceptionally complex Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this interview, Tamplin explores his motivation behind this continuous dedication to Jabra’s work, as he dives into his experience translating The Other Rooms.

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Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder 

Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder 

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Zia Ahmed discuss approaching Arabic translation via English and Urdu, the layers of “outsider-ness” in translation, and the boom of narrative fiction in Oman.

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Sinan Antoon’s ‘Of Loss and Lavender’

Sinan Antoon's 'Of Loss and Lavender'

In this conversation over e-mail, Sinan Antoon talks about the novel, the fraught nature of collective memory, the process of self-translation, and the sort of “security checkpoints” a book must pass through in the process of translation.

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In Focus

From Gaza
Between Two Arabic Translators with Yasmeen Hanoosh
2024 Flash Fiction Finalists

From the archives

‘To Keep That Wrongness’: Adania Shibli on Relating to Language in ‘Minor Detail’

‘To Keep That Wrongness’: Adania Shibli on Relating to Language in 'Minor Detail'
By Alex Tan On 12 September 2024, the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was in New York City to speak about ...

‘Writing in Gaza’: by Yousef el-Qedra

'Writing in Gaza': by Yousef el-Qedra
Yousef el-Qedra is a poet and playwright in Gaza; you can read more of his work in translation in Hayden’s ...

‘Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song’

'Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song'
This piece appeared in our Spring 2021 SONG issue.  By Shaimaa Abulebda It was last year when a short video ...