On Translation, Love, and Israeli Prison
Dima Wannous’s ‘Damascus: A Tomb and a Prison’
Sheikh Zayed Book Award Announces 2026 Winners
Fiction
Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s ‘The Wall’
“The Wall,” by the massively popular Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (1962-2008) is from his collection “Now I Understand.”
Poetry
Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’
“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”
Interviews
On Translation, Love, and Israeli Prison
Addie Leak talks with Tugrul Mende about the translation process, literary awards, and two very different translations processes: translating one book through a riot of multilingual voicenotes and another by an author who was inaccessible, in an Israeli prison.
Moneera Al-Ghadeer Answers: ‘Why Saudi Poetry?’
Tracing the Ether Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia, ed. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, came out late last year from Syracuse University Press. The anthology brings together 26 poets responding to — and writing a new future for — a rapidly changing Saudi Arabia. Moneera answered a few questions about the collection.
On the Field of Arabic Studies
Translator-scholar Jonas Elbousty talks with Roger Allen about his journey in the field of Arabic Studies.
In Focus
From the archives
Egyptian Novelist Shady Lewis on Coptic Identity, Church-State Relations, and Citizenship
“In Ways of the Lord, Christians are mistaken for being Jews and are accused of spying for Israel, which demonstrates the lack of recognition of Copts and their conflation with other minorities.”
Safia Ketou: The First Algerian Sci-fi Novelist of Post-independence Algeria
The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’







