Skip to main content

Theme: Exploded Hearts of the Arab Spring

Editorial

Exploded Hearts of the Arab Spring

“A poem is a thought that bores through the heart—exploding it” - Marie Lundquist Ten years have passed since we...

Text: Kholod Saghir, Acting chief-in-editor January 25 2021
Poetry

An Echo

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
Interview

Interview with the Iraqi author Hassan Blasim

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...

By: Kholod Saghir June 10 2021
Poetry

Poems by Somaya El Sousi

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...

Poems: Somaya El Sousi May 26 2021
Article

Prose Poem in Arabic and Jordanian Poetry

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...

Text: Maha Alautoom May 19 2021
Article

Eros as Activist

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...

Text: Helena Boberg April 28 2021
Interview

Interview with the Tunisian poet Inas Abassi

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...

Text: Sarra Anaya April 21 2021
Article

A portrait of the fugitive in his shelter

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...

Text: Jafaar April 14 2021
Poetry

A Poet behind Israeli bars

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...

Poem: Dareen Tatour March 24 2021
Article

From Collective Intimacy to the Horizon of the Self

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...

Text: Samira Negrouche March 17 2021
Article

The ideal choice for a young Iraqi poet

“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...

Text: Ali Thareb March 10 2021
Poetry

Poem by Abdulwahab Latinos

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...

Poem: Abdulwahab Latinos March 03 2021
Article

National Allegories: The Case of Poet Abdel Wahab Latinos

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...

Text: Najlaa Eltom March 03 2021
Article

Female Poets and the Egyptian Revolution

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

Search