Having taken the momentous decision to learn to read and write when in his early 20s, Choukri joins a children’s class at the local state school in Tangier. Here, he leads a life of desperate poverty. In order to survive, he does a bit of everything. When not at school, he hangs out in cafes, […]
The recent history of the Arab World presents a dismal story of pain, horror, and suffering. The causes are many and the blame game endless. However, the happy experiences of one Englishman throw a quite contrary light on current events, and have been written down as a way of saying thank you to all the […]
As a child in pre-First-World-War Palestine, Jabra recalls daily life in Bethlehem and Jerusalem with pin-sharp observation and a vivid use of language. His writing is funny, moving and tender. His Christian family, his school friends and the eccentric characters of the surrounding streets all come to life, and Jabra’s love of the Arabic language […]
Award-winning Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish has been hailed the most important Arab poet of the modern age, his reputation only increasing since his death in 2008, his work coming to represent the voice of a generation and of a people. Comparisons have been drawn between his work and that of his close friend […]
The unfolding events in the run up to the Iraq war had given Tom Hurndall, a 21-year-old British photojournalist, an increased curiosity and desire to journey to the Middle East. In February 2003, initially as an observer alongside the Human Shields, he left with a passion to make a difference, to record and photograph the […]
In 1996 Barghouti went back to his Palestinian home for the first time since his exile following the Six-Day War in 1967, first in Egypt and then in Hungary, and wrote a poignant and incisive account of the exile’s lot in the acclaimed memoir I Saw Ramallah. In 2003 he returned to Ramallah to introduce […]
Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world’s celebrated Nobel laureate for literature, died in Cairo on 30 August 2006. He was 94 years old and had been in frail health since an assassination attempt in 1994, which left him almost unable to write. Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11, 1911, in the old Gamaliya quarter of […]
This is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel by the ‘only gay man’ in Morocco. An autobiographical novel by turn naive and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taia is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. "Salvation Army" is a coming-of-age novel […]