The winner of the 2020 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Fiction for her ground-breaking Mamluk centered novel, Awlad Al-Naas, Reem Bassiouney has maintained her high profile in the literary world by rapidly producing another brilliant historical novel, (...)
Hill Musk evokes Catherine Earnshaw and the all too familiar world of Wuthering Heights. It evokes Amina and the all too familiar world of Palace Walk. In it the two are joined by Mariam, the literary scholar and novelist Sahar El-Mougy's fictional (...)
The well-researched historical novel is flourishing in Egypt and the Arab world, and the award-winning Al Azbakeya by Nasser Iraq is a good example. True to form, the novel is prologued with excerpts from books, official documents and private (...)
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive, by Hala Halim, Fordham University Press: NewYork, 2013
From antiquity to the present, Alexandria, founded by, and named after Alexander the Great, has fascinated and mesmerised. Feminised and beckoning, (...)
Sinan Antoon's novel shortlisted for Arabic Booker Prize traces two Iraqi families through decades of change, mixing history, politics, and sectarian tension to weave a painful story of the present Iraq
Ya maryam (Hail Mary) by Sinan Antoon, (...)
Written by yet another instructor of English literature, Dina Abdel-Salam's debut novel displays a familiar storyline, one which fits snugly into the framework of Egyptian feminist writing which burgeoned over the last thirty years. It is a female (...)
Nazek Fahmy, attending a lecture by Umberto Eco, finds out about vegetal and mineral memory
Since its inauguration a little over a year ago, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has offered the public one major event after another. Notably it plays host to (...)