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“After his father died, they found an old English biscuit tin at the bottom of the wardrobe. What lay inside it puzzled him greatly.”

Published by Dar al-Shorouk in January 2026, Ahmed ʿAbd al-Manʿam Ramadan’s novel “في مدينة الذباب” (In the City of Flies) presents a dystopian vision of a future city overwhelmed by accumulating rubbish and swarms of flies.

The title here is borrowed from the French edition, Un goût de thé amer, which was translated by Sarah Rolfo, while the Arabic original is titled العراك في جهنم. This satirical novella is set in a Libyan village called Hell and is a retelling of events our narrator claims took place there in the 1990s.

Amer Badran is Palestinian poet and doctor. He has six poetry collections.

“So we open our mouths, / not to scream, / but to release the silence.”

There are events around the world this September 25-27 celebrating the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, after the Arab World Institute and Centre Pompidou declared September 25 to be “Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day.”

“We’re creating a space where Palestinian artists are not required to do or be anything other than themselves, and there’s no pressure to ‘represent’ or do anything other than share their artistic practice, we’re not looking for answers, we want to create shared space, which what theatre in its essential form.”

“Before I loved poems, I loved language. As a child I thought many times about inventing a new language and teaching it to the children my age, so that all of us could slip out of the world’s language in a way of our own. It was a childish, almost primal tenderness for words, and I still feel it in me.”

This episode of the BULAQ podcast asks: What has changed in the last twenty years in Arabic literature, publishing and translation? What has not?

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,

“In her poetry world, the sun is red. The moon is purple. Snow is ubiquitous. Winter is eternal.”

How do we speak of political prisoners while they are still inside, and how do we speak with them once they’re out? This is not a question about representation, but rather about production; about what we manufacture when we speak or write about political prisoners.