Dear readers, I have recently announced that my short stories will be available for free via my website. If you visit my homepage, you can scroll through the posted ones and choose any that take your fancy. Let me know... Continue Reading →
Dear readers, I am pleased to announce that my latest novel will be published by Beacon Books this coming year. I am looking forward to sharing this journey with you. Soon the title and book cover will be revealed and... Continue Reading →
I remembered the day I cracked. It was Sunday 11th September, the first day of term. I was in my kitchen scrubbing clean pans with the window ajar. The sound of bristles scraping on empty pans was interrupted by the... Continue Reading →
An excerpt from a memoir piece. TW: Loss, cancer I will always remember that summer when us three girls were on the brink of turning nineteen. Every summer, our houses would be surrounded by fields full of rapeseed with its... Continue Reading →
Sabah, Borneo. A wooden boardwalk weaved through the 130 million-year-old rainforest that grew down to the coast on the South China Sea in Sarawak, Borneo. Dense jungle trapped the moisture in the air. Under the rainforest canopy as we walked... Continue Reading →
This piece is from ArabLit one of my favourite blogs & one worth signing up to.
Issue 3 of The Bennington Review has a poem by Ghassan Zaqtan, “Damascus 1986,” translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah:
Zaqtan, of course, is a multi-award-winning Palestinian writer living in Ramallah, the author of ten collections of poetry and two novellas, winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize (for Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, tr. Joudah)and twice nominated for the Neustadt Prize. The Silence That Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), also translated by Joudah, is his most recent poetry collection to appear in English.
His novella, Describing the Past, translated by Samuel Wilder (2016), is a must-read; his Where the Bird Disappeared (2018) builds on that book.
This poem, “Damascus 1986,” is full of hard sounds, scarcely tethered images, and missed opportunities. It opens:
DAMASCUS 1986
The key’s clang
the sun I called from the windowsill
the brief time of fondness
none of it were mine
Read the…
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At an English Tearoom, Sabah ,Borneo. The Agnes Keith house sits on a hill in Sabah Borneo. Agnes was an American author who married the British Conservator of the Forests and lived in Borneo in 1936. Their old house is... Continue Reading →
I wrote this in my writing journal after a trip to the beautiful, mountainous region of Oman. If you ever get a chance to visit, I highly recommend it. It's a beautiful part of the world & during the winter... Continue Reading →
Via Arablit
Birds
Ahmed Shafie (http://shaaaf.blogspot.com) is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator who oddly does not have a collection in English translation, although his work has been translated by Robin Moger and, here, by Humphrey Davies:
Shafie was a 2014 resident at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program, and he’s the author of the acclaimed collection 77 (2017), which made several “best of 2017” lists. Before that, he published Other Poems (2009), and A Side Street Ending in a Fountain (2000), and he’s also published two novels: The Creator (2013) and Sousou’s Journey (2003).
He’s also an award-winning translator; his translation of Russell Edson’s Collected Prose Poems was one of Muhammad Abdelnaby’s “favorite reads” of 2015.
This latest translation, by multi-award-winning translator and scholar Humphrey Davies, appears in Rusted Radishes. It is taken from his collection 77, where it was untitled.
It opens:
BIRDS
have no hands.
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