Hanan al-Shaykh
Hanan al-Shaykh حنان الشيخ
Hanan al-Shaykh is one of the most acclaimed award-winning writers in the contemporary Arab world whose work has been translated into 21 languages and is now published around the world. She was born in 1944 in Beirut and grew up in Lebanon. She started her writing career at 16, publishing essays at An-Nahar newspaper. She then moved to Egypt to continue her studies at the American College for Girls in Cairo. During these four years in Cairo, she made her debut as a writer with The Suicide of a Dead Man. When she returned to Beirut, she resumed her journalistic career with Al Hasna' women's magazine and featured a series of interviews for television with 21 prominent women in the country. She witnessed the beginning of the Lebanese civil war that inspired her to write Hikayat Zahra which was praised by the Boston Sunday Globe and propelled her to fame. In 1975, she fled war-ravaged Lebanon with her two young children Tarek and Juman and went to London. She later joined her husband between 1977 and 1983 in Saudi Arabia and wrote Women of Sand and Myrrh which was translated into French and won her the literary prize of Elle magazine.
Translated Titles by Hanan al-Shaykh
The realities of life in the gilded cage for contemporary Arab women—in the first US publication from Lebanese-born writer al-Shaykh. Though imbued with an urgent sense of lives blighted and talents wasted, al-Shaykh—in telling her four women protagonists' stories—makes her points by accumulating illustrative detail rather than launching a polemic. In a nameless Middle Eastern city, four friends struggle to make full lives in a society where women cannot drive a car, walk in the streets unveiled, and, if they do have jobs, must work in segregated areas. It's also a society where sex, because of all the constraints, becomes an unhealthy obsession. Only one of the women, Suzanne, a Texan there with her husband on assignment, enjoys the Middle Eastern way of life. As a Westerner, she has more freedom but, more importantly, with her marriage failing—she suspects her husband is gay—she enjoys the attention of the men attracted by her novelty. Suha, a well-educated Lebanese woman, came with her husband to escape the war -but finding the stifling boredom worse than any bombing, and ashamed of a lesbian relationship with wealthy Nur, she returns to Beirut. Nur, the daughter of a wealthy Bedouin, is the quintessential bored rich woman who seeks sensation at the expense of her marriage to a Western-educated, would-be reformer. And Tamr, whose Turkish mother had been sent to a sheik's harem as a young girl and was married herself at 12, is encouraged by Suha to divorce and then, with the obligatory permission from her closest male relative, start a small, and of necessity women's-only, business. An eloquent and subtle plea for liberalization, as well as an evocative description of a society torn between tradition and the West. A promising debut.
Zahra’s mother uses her as a cover for her meetings with a lover; Zahra’s strict father mistreats her for being complicit in her mother’s affair. Fleeing from Beirut in search of solace, Zahra stays with her uncle in West Africa—and then uses marriage as another kind of escape. Back in Beirut, love finally comes to her, but with terrible consequences. Banned in several Middle Eastern countries since its original publication, The Story of Zahra is an intoxicating, provocative story of a young woman’s coming of age in a city torn apart by war.
Four strangers meet on a turbulent flight from Dubai to London: Amira, a canny Moroccan prostitute; Lamis, a 30-year-old Iraqi divorcee; Nicholas, an English expert on Islamic art; and Samir, a Lebanese man who is delivering a monkey on a mission he doesn’t fully understand. Once safely on British soil, Lamis and Nicholas fall in love, Samir chases after blond British youths, and Amira reinvents herself as a princess, the better to lure clients at the best London hotels. Through the city and across cultural borders, Only in London wittily portrays the smells, sounds, and sights of London’s lively Arab neighborhoods, as well as the freedoms the city both offers and withholds from its immigrants.
THE LOCUST AND THE BIRD: MY MOTHER’S STORY
Married at a young age against her will, Kamila soon fell head-over-heels in love with another man and was forced to choose between her children and her lover. As the narrative unfolds through the years – from the bazaars, cinemas, and apartments of 1930s Beirut to its war-torn streets decades later – the tale follows this passionate woman as she survives the tragedies and celebrates the triumphs of a life lived to the very fullest.
Elias Khoury
Elias Khoury إلياس خوري
The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury was born in Beirut in 1948 and studied Sociology and History at Lebanese University in Beirut and the University of Paris. He is a public intellectual who plays a major role in the Arabic cultural scene and in the defense of the liberty of expression and democracy, and he is a cultural activist who directed the theatre of Beirut and co-directed the Ayloul Festival of Modern Arts in Beirut. His academic career includes his work as a Professor at Columbia University, the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the Lebanese American University.
Translated Titles by Elias Khoury
Yalo
Yalo is a young man drifting between worlds like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, he falls in with a dangerous circle whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a horrifying reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and armed robbery and is imprisoned. Tortured and interrogated at length, he is forced to confess to crimes of which he has little or no recollection. As he writes and rewrites his testimony, he begins to grasp his family’s past, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.
Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. Keeping vigil at the old man’s bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes’s own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.