Maggie Gee’s journey starts a long way from the literary world in a small family in post-war Britain. At seventeen, Maggie, goes, a lamb to the slaughter, to university. From the 1960s onwards she lives the defining events […]
Memoir and Biography
I Killed Scheherazade
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is angry about the way Arab women are portrayed in the West. In I Killed Scheherazade she challenges prevalent notions of identity and womanhood in the Middle East and speaks of her own intellectual development and […]
In Jail with Nazım Hikmet
Orhan Kemal
Bursa prison, mid-winter 1940. Two prisoners meet, both writers, both serving long sentences for allegedly inciting Turkish soldiers to mutiny. One is Turkey’s most famous poet and communist, Nazım Hikmet; the other a young, aspiring poet, Orhan Kemal, […]
The Silence of my Father
Alexandre Najjar
Alexandre Najjar’s father was celebrated in the legal profession for his rare eloquence. In the courtroom the word is everything, and his work was his life. He was also the father of six children, punishing them severely when they broke the […]
Hussein and Abdullah
Randa Habib
In January 1999, a newswire shocked Jordan. King Hussein announced that it was not his brother Hassan that would succeed him but his son Abdullah. Less than a week later, King Hussein was dead. During his forty-six-year reign, […]
A River Dies of Thirst
Mahmoud Darwish
‘A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches […]