This week, our editors bring news of passed icons, emerging contemporary voices, and ongoing celebrations and commemorations of writers whose works continue to find relevance and vitality. Read on to find out more!
Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt
With the passing of the maverick Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim on August 13, Arabic literature has lost one of its fiercest voices and most uncompromising innovators. A novelist whose life and art were inseparable, Ibrahim transformed the experience of political imprisonment and disillusionment into a new literary form—a documentary style blurring the line between fiction and archive, testimony and imagination.
With his searing debut, That Smell—a slim novel once censored for its stark account of alienation and defeat—Ibrahim was widely regarded as a writer who heralded the arrival of the so-called “Generation of the Sixties.” From there, he would move into the biting satire of The Committee, the sprawling narratives of Sharaf and Warda, and the layered social chronicles of Zaat, documenting the disappointments and contradictions of modern Egypt with unparalleled clarity. His prose was stripped down, almost forensic, yet behind its austere surface pulsed the fury of a writer determined to expose what power sought to conceal.
In 2003, when he refused the Egyptian state’s most prestigious literary prize on live television, denouncing corruption and repression in the same breath, Ibrahim embodied the ethic that guided his career: literature as resistance, and the writer as witness. That moment, like his novels, will continue to resonate far beyond Egypt’s borders, reminding us of literature’s capacity to unsettle, provoke, and hold authority accountable.
For readers in Arabic and in translation, Sonallah Ibrahim remains a towering figure whose words echo with revolutionary urgency. His passing is a profound loss, but his legacy endures as a testament to the belief that fiction, at its truest, can be a weapon against erasure and forgetting.
In other news, the eleventh edition of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels has unveiled a vibrant shortlist of nine titles representing Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, Yemen, and Tunisia. Egypt and Palestine lead the list with two novels each.
From Egypt, the shortlisted authors are Ibrahim Farghali for Bayt min Zukhruf: ʿAshīqat Ibn Rushd (A House of Ornament: The Beloved of Ibn Rushd) and Sameer Darwish for Laysa Baʿīdan ʿan Raʾs al-Rajul: ʿAzīza wa-Yūnus (Not Away from the Man’s Head: Aziza and Yunis). Farghaly’s novel, which he has described in a television interview as a “fictionalized biography of Ibn Rushd’s thoughts,” interlaces two love stories between a professor and his student: one set in eleventh-century Andalusia, the other in the twenty-first century. The philosopher’s ordeal—which includes exile and the burning of his books—repeats itself across time.
Darwish’s novel, meanwhile, reimagines an ancient legend from the epic poem “Sirat Bani Hilal” within a contemporary frame. It revisits the timeless cycles of love, loss, and absence, affirming that history does not merely repeat, but refracts into countless shades and fresh forms of pain.
Last week, in Fayoum, Egypt, the Egyptian Writers’ Union convened a one-day conference to honor the work of poet and journalist Nady Hafez. The event featured twenty-two new critical studies that mapped Hafez’s decades-long experimentation across forms—from the classical ode and the free-verse poem to the prose poem, which he calls “the lucid poem, the highest tree in the forest of poetry.” Born in Fayoum, trained in philosophy at Alexandria University, and long based in Kuwait, Hafez has balanced the austerity of prose poetry with an openness to quotidian life and its neglected margins. Speakers at the conference—including critics, researchers, and fellow poets—emphasized his role in helping the Egyptian prose poem cross into the Gulf, particularly through the Tuesday Cultural Forum, which he co-founded in Kuwait in 1996. Rejecting the gatekeeping of official culture, Hafez has consistently championed grassroots literary gatherings, describing institutional criticism as “heavily armed” while viewing parallel forums as genuine spaces of creative freedom. Critics praised Hafez’s ability to sustain both accessibility and innovation, nothing that his texts resist obscurity yet remain daring. As the conference affirmed, Nady Hafez is not only a poet but also a cultural bridge, a writer who has helped redefine the prose poem as an urgent, human form of resistance.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Central America
In November of last year, we reported on the latest release from famed Guatemalan author Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez, Alguien bailará con nuestras tumbas, which consists of three novellas: La era glacial, Para eso están los amigos, and Todo lo que no se sabe. This year, in May, Editorial Almadía in Mexico re-released La era glacial, a narrative loosely based on the late-Argentinian singer and songwriter Facundo Cabral, who was killed in Guatemala City in 2011 from an attack intended for a convicted criminal named Henry Fariña. Then, in July, Alguien bailará con nuestras tumbas won the inaugural Premio Tierra de Maíz, awarded by the French Embassy in Guatemala and the Alliance Française Guatemala.
In early August, Colombia’s Pluma Errante Editorial reissued Martín Díaz Valdés’s El acto de los Wayob, which earned the author the 2023 Monteforte Toledo Prize. Díaz Valdés was also invited to this year’s Feria del Libro Mazatenango, which was attended by the likes of Joaquín Orellana, C Miguel Angel Oxlaj, and many more writers and readers who came together to celebrate the works of Central American icons like Alaíde Foppa and Claribel Alegría.
During this year’s FILGUA (Guatemala’s biggest and most important book fair), the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala unveiled the latest winner of the Luis Cardoza y Aragón Prize for Mesoamerican Poets: the Mexican writer Guadalupe de Jesús Hernández, who was awarded the prize for his poetry collection, Lontananza. Previous winners include David Cruz (Costa Rica), Wingston González (Guatemala), and Nadia López García (Mexico).
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria
One of Bulgaria’s most renowned poets, Boris Hristov, recently celebrated his eightieth birthday. During the country’s repressive socialist peak (i.e. the 1970s and 1980s), Hristov’s work was considered among the finest being written; the poems, which could be described as subversive, go as far as to suggest the destruction of the literal wall that surrounded the nation’s borders. After the mid-1990s, Hristov and his wife settled in the village of Leshten, where they continued to make art, each in their own way. One could say that this self-imposed form of exile or withdrawal from society perfectly fits Hristov’s strict artistic philosophy.
To celebrate his anniversary, the magazine Въпреки has published an excerpt from a book by the literary scholar Bozhidar Kunchev. In it, Kunchev confirms:
Boris Hristov’s oeuvre is a cry against a complacent existence, against fear and prohibitions, a cry before the Wall because of which human life was not a ‘departure’ and ‘return,’ but only doom and a path to Nothingness. In this cry, one recognizes the pain of trampled humanity and the cruel consequences of the total control of ideology and the state, the rebellion of conscience over the replacement of humanity and the diversity of life as evident in both its mimicry and meaninglessness.
If you too wish to partake in the celebration of this exceptional anniversary, you could do so by reading Hristov’s “The Wall,” translated into English by Stefan D. Stefanov.
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