Students studying the writing programme at the Fryshuset Upper Secondary School in Stockholm have collectively written poetry in answer to voices in the issue “Exploded Hearts of the Arab Spring” (PEN...
Text: Julia, Sara, Walter, Assassinmidnight, Sofia, Noah
October 08 2021
Hassan Blasim is a writer, poet, and film director who has been called "perhaps the best living Arab writer.” His international breakthrough was with his acclaimed collection of short stories Iraqi...
Somaya El Sousi (1974) is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. She made her debut in 1998 with her poetry collection The First Sip of the Sea's Chest. EL Sousi has published five poetry collections. For a...
Jordan is the country where the Arab Spring did not take place. The Hashemite Kingdom has survived and the regime remains stable. Maha Alautoom, a Jordanian poet and academic (born 1973), claims in...
When we headed towards the journalism, we met Yaroub Aleesa (born 1969 in the Syrian province of Hama). He picked us out of the confusion of the streets and led us into the house of journalism where...
The task of the translator is to facilitate the love between the original and its shadow, says Gayatri Spivak. The poet and translator Helena Boberg (b. 1974) in this essay discusses the role of...
Ten years have passed since the start of what is popularly called “The Arab Spring,” a series of revolutions that began in Tunisia when the vegetable dealer Mohammed Bouazizi self-immolated in protest...
In this text, the pseudonym Jafaar looks back from his European life in exile on his and other dissidents' experiences of arrests and torture from Egyptian prisons. The notes are divided by colours...
This is a shorter version of an interview made by Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies with the Syrian poet and the Tucholsky prize winner (2007) Faraj Bayrakdar. Bayrakdar, who had first...
Dareen Tatour is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and photographer from the Arab town Reineh between Nazareth and Qana in Galilee. Body and soul, she is an activist—her resistance to the occupation of...
The poet and translator Samira Negrouche writes from within Algeria as a country marked by grief, she keeps returning to this: the silence around the heritage, the lack of a cultural infrastructure...
“When life finally reached us / I was inside a coffin running around,” writes the Iraqi poet Ali Thareb in one of his early poems. Ali was born in 1988 in the city of Babil in Iraq. These lines...
On Aug. 20, 2020, Sudanese poet Abdel Wahab Latinos drowned in the English Channel with an unknown number of African immigrants. Death and the desire to diminish were frequent themes in Abdel Wahab’s...
Naljaa Altom is a Sudanese poet, writer, translator, academic, and intellectual activist. She was born in Khartoum in 1975 and since a few years back she lives in Sweden as a dissident. She also...
An avid reader or a person interested in poetry often find that certain lines and images become indelible and keep recurring. A father cawing like a crow or a woman baking bread in the ruins of a war...
Text: Hoda Omran
January 25 2021
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