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Sweden: fellow globetrotters
I’m not the only one trying to read the world. Since I launched this project to explore a novel, short story collection or memoir from every UN-recognised country in 2012, I’ve heard from people...
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Oman: a rare treat
Last December, when Cairo-based blogger mlynxqualey wrote a post on her excellent Arabic Literature (in English) blog giving me her recommendations for books in translation, Oman proved to be a...
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Sudan: the outsider
There were several great contenders in translation for Sudan. What swung it for Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North was the fact that it was named the most important Arab novel of the 20th...
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United Arab Emirates: on the money
One thing this quest has taught me is that there’s no harm in trying. You can never predict whether someone will help you from reading their biography or studying their tweets. The worst that can...
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Egypt: breaking boundaries
This was another recommendation from Roger Allen, Professor Emeritus of Arabic & Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His number-one tip for Egypt was Nobel Prize-winner...
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Kuwait: the icing on the cake
Hearing that I was struggling to find a Kuwaiti book that I could read in English, Fleur Montanaro, administrator of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, asked a contact for advice. Word came...
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Jordan: winds of change
Hearing that my friend Andrew was off to the Middle East for a choir tour in October, I decided to recruit him to find my Jordanian book. The schedule for the tour was tight, but a brief window in...
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Book of the month: Abdulaziz Al Farsi
About 18 months ago, fellow literary explorer Camila Navarro from Brazil (who is recording her own literary odyssey on her Portuguese-language website) got in touch. ‘Ann, I have good news!’ she...
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How much do Arabic speakers read?
This week I had the great honour of being one of the speakers at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai. It was the third annual conference organised by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation (MBRF) to...
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Book of the month: Najwa Barakat
Since my visit to Dubai at the start of December, I’ve been reading a fair bit of Arabic fiction. The last few weeks have seen me venturing into stories by writers from several of the 22 Arab nations,...
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Book of the month: Basma Abdel Aziz
An editor once told me that she worked on the basis that a reader has to hear about a book five times before he or she will buy it. April’s Book of the month is a neat demonstration of her theory. In...
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Book of the month: Sonia Nimr
Full disclosure: I had quite a different title lined up as my final book of the month of 2020. I was going to write a glowing response to the startling and compelling It Would Be Night in Caracas by...
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Book of the month: Shalash the Iraqi
‘I won’t disappear. I’m the people. I’m the poor. I am the truth. I’m a scream of protest in the face of crimes.’ I learnt to read when I was 30 years old. For the first three decades of my life, I...
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Book of the month: Shalash the Iraqi
‘I won’t disappear. I’m the people. I’m the poor. I am the truth. I’m a scream of protest in the face of crimes.’ I learnt to read when I was 30 years old. For the first three decades of my life, I...
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