KILIS, Turkey — The colorful balloons Egyptian activist Moushira Saleh gave Mohamed last week were among the few things that brought him joy. He was about to temporarily leave the Kilis refugee camp on the Turkish border as the family's three-month (...)
With the beats of the karakeb (large metal castanets) and the clap of their hands, Moroccan artists Mahdi Nassouli and Hicham Bajjou introduced audiences at the Cairo Opera House on Wednesday night to Gnawa, a hybrid African-Sufi music. The (...)
A puppet can quickly spark controversy; that's what happened on Saturday evening at the “Meetphool: Mime, Clown and Street performance” event outside the rundown Viennoise Hotel downtown.
We, the audience, were surprised by a sudden maelstrom, a (...)
A Bahraini doctor, a female Yemeni writer and an Egyptian football player were sitting on a stage last week to tell their stories about the revolutions.
Hosted by the Spring Festival, organized by the Culture Resource in collaboration with the (...)
Since the Institut d'Egypte burned down in December during clashes resulting from a sit-in by the cabinet being violently dispersed by police, people have been concerned about the national treasures of rare books damaged by the fire.
Few knew of the (...)
“I'm a young female, gambling on [people's] imagination.”
This is how the 42-year-old novelist and associate professor of English at Suez Canal University, Mona Prince, introduced herself for the presidential race.
Prince never planned to delve into (...)
Lebanese censors on Saturday reversed their decision to ban “On the Importance of Being an Arab,” a monodrama by Egyptian theater director Ahmed al-Attar, from showing at the Monnot Theater in Beirut.
“On the Importance of Being an Arab” was (...)
Saeed Tawfiq, a professor of aesthetics at Cairo University, was appointed the new secretary general of the Supreme Council of Culture on Thursday, after the resignation of Camellia Sobhy.
Sobhy, the first woman to head the council, resigned after (...)
From the outset, the 43rd Cairo International Book Fair was surrounded by controversy. The government called for postponing it due to security concerns, but many opposed the move. The Egyptian Publishers Association warned that the fair would be (...)
During the run-up to the last two parliamentary elections, trucks decorated with colorful campaign posters, blasting music from megaphones, roamed the streets. Pedestrians would occasionally stop to listen, and people would lean out their windows to (...)
The last three films — “H-Dabbour,” 2008; “Fly,” 2009; and “No Retreat, No Surrender: The Bloody Fist,” 2010 — starring filmmaker, screenwriter, actor and rapper Ahmed Mekky were outright comedies.
With this in mind, viewers flocked to see his “Cima (...)
Egypt's National Center for Translation awarded the Refa'a al-Tahtawy Prize for Translation to Tawfik Ali Mansour (b. 1931) on Tuesday, for his translation of “Nahr al-Nil” (The Nile: Sharing a Scarce Resource).
As the center's most prestigious (...)
A cooperation protocol was signed on Monday between the Culture Ministry and the American University in Cairo (AUC) to launch the House of Translation, an ambitious partnership between the ministry's National Center for Translation (NCT) and AUC's (...)
You must have heard the song "I'm the one whose life is so wrong,” by shaabi DJ Amr Haha. The DJs, singers and growing fan base of this genre, that mixes electro, hip-hop, folk and Sufi music, are “Out of the Picture” according to Cairo's Genaina (...)
Many might receive "Albawtaka Review's" quarterly newsletter in their inbox, but few know the story behind the literary journal and the translated anthologies that “Albawtaka Publishing” has been putting together over the past five years.
Behind the (...)
On 24 September, Egyptian poets celebrated World Poetry Movement Day with recitations across Cairo, the most notable of which was the "100 Thousand Poets for Change" event organized by the Independent Arts Coalition, at downtown's Rawabet (...)
It seems that some people are now betting on the 1970s generation of intellectuals, promoting independent projects, for “it is they who protected the country over the years and acted as its safety valve with their awareness and insistence on success (...)
Social alienation seems to be the keynote of Mostafa Zaki's selection of short stories, "Mashhad Min Layl al-Qahira” (A Scene from Cairo's Night), recently published by Dar al-Ain.
The young Alexandrian writer was born in 1980 and raised in the (...)
The first Arab Book Fair opened on Thursday morning at the Cairo Opera House's Gezira Garden, with Cairo Governor Abdel Kawi Khalifa promising to hold the event annually.
The fair is envisioned as one way to compensate publishers for lost revenues (...)
For eight consecutive nights, the courtyard of Al-Ghouri Dome in Islamic Cairo has been packed full as the fourth edition of the International Samaa Festival for Sufi Music and Chanting attracts an eager crowd.
Fourteen bands are participating in (...)
The General Egyptian Book Organization last month appointed a committee of reputable writers and literati, headed by author Ibrahim al-Aslan, to reform a cultural project to promote reading, “Maktabet al-Osra” (Family Library).
Since its (...)
After years of rejection by the Mubarak regime on the grounds that Egyptian antiquities are an issue of “national sovereignty,” the first Egyptian Archaeologists Syndicate was launched last week; and Fayza Haikal, Egyptology professor at The (...)
"We are a generation without literary masters," is author Mohamed Hafez Ragab's most famous quote, for which he was equally criticized and venerated throughout his long career.
As Ragab turns 76 today, Dar al-Ein publishing house is publishing his (...)
The Supreme Council of Culture, headed by Culture Minister Emad Abu Ghazi, announced the winners of the state's 2011 cultural awards on Saturday evening.
The Nile Awards (previously named after Hosni Mubarak) are the highest and most prestigious of (...)
When the late Abdel Halim Hafez (1929-77) first sang his patriotic songs in the 1950s and 1960s, he didn't imagine that they would become a voice of the Egyptian revolution half a century later.
"I swear on its sky and soil/ I swear on its roads and (...)