Chadian Author Wins 2026 Bait AlGhasham DarArab Prize
From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’
On Finding Community Through Adabiyat
Fiction
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.
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’
In this short fiction from Kuwait, the central character and his author are in a standoff over a telephone call.
Poetry
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
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.
Three Poems by Nima Hasan
“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”
Interviews
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.
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.
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.
In Focus
From the archives
‘To Keep That Wrongness’: Adania Shibli on Relating to Language in ‘Minor Detail’
‘Writing in Gaza’: by Yousef el-Qedra
‘Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song’



