As a teenager in Cairo in the early 1940s, Inji Efflatoun made two great discoveries: art and the Communist Party. Although she was from an elite French-speaking background, Efflatoun chose to “re-Egyptianize” herself, pursue painting and throw herself full-heartedly into anti-imperialist, feminist and leftist agitation. She was eventually arrested during President Nasser’s repression of Communists in the early 1960s. It was in prison that she embarked upon the most productive stage of her career as an artist. Today, her prison portraits and the vibrant, luminous paintings of Egyptian rural life she painted after her release are iconic. 

In this episode we speak to Ahmed Gobba and Avery Gonzales, co-translators of Efflatoun’s 1993 memoir, “The Memoir of Inji Efflatoun: From Childhood to Prison.” The memoir is the nucleus of a new book, The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun, published by SKIRA and edited by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh. It comes out in the US on October 7 and is available to pre-order now. 

You can view a digitalized collection of Efflatoun’s work on the Barjeel Art Foundation’s website and read a review of the book in the National by Razmig Bedirian. 

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation -- an independent Sharjah-based institution, founded in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi to preserve, exhibit and research one of the most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art from the Arab World. One of the Barjeel Art Foundation’s objectives is developing a public platform to foster critical dialogue around art practices, to convey nuanced Arab histories beyond the borders of culture and geography. For more information about the Barjeel Art Foundation’s activities and exhibitions, please visit www.barjeelartfoundation.org 

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at [email protected].

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The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. Several years ago, we discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim’s most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.” 

Show Notes: 

Hosam Aboul-ela is a professor of English at the University of Houston and the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. 

Ibrahim’s first novel, That Smell, and his prison diaries, have been published in a single volume, trans. Robyn Creswell, from New Directions. 

Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela’s translation, from Yale University Press.

Hosam’s translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth is available from New Directions.

Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, in Tony Calderbank’s translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.

Ursula wrote a little something about her meetings, interviews and memories of Ibrahim here: https://www.ursulalindsey.com/blog

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The Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri grew up poor and illiterate on the streets of Tangier in the waning years of colonialism. He told the story of his childhood in his autobiographical novel For Bread Alone – El Khubz El Hafi in Arabic, Le Pain Nu in French. Choukri went on to write much more, chronicling life in post-independence Morocco during the “years of lead,” and the marginalized underclass of Tangier: its barflies, prostitutes, petty criminals, day-to-day survivors. We spoke to scholar and translator Jonas El Busty about the unique subversiveness of Choukri’s work, and why it still resonates so strongly today. We also talked about the reception of Choukri’s work, and the power dynamics embedded in its translation. 

SHOW NOTES

Jonas El Bousty is a professor of Arabic at Yale University. He has translated Choukri’s short story collection Tales of Tangier, as well as the third installment of Choukri’s autobiography, Faces, and is the editor, alongside Roger Allen, of the scholarly anthology Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives: Hunger in Eden. 

For Bread Alone was translated by Paul Bowles, in a process that remains contentious to this day. 

Choukri’s writing about some of the famous Western writers – Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles – who visited or lived in Tangiers is collected in In Tangier 

Ursula recently wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on Choukri, Tangier, colonialism and nostalgia. 

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Batool Abu Akleen is a poet and translator in Gaza, Palestine. Her home in Gaza City and her university have been bombed and she has been displaced multiple times. We talked to her about refusing to write and then choosing to write through the genocide; about the importance of mentors; and about creating a community of literary translators in Gaza. Her first full-length collection, 48 kg, is set to appear from Tenement Press in June of this year. (Apologies for the sound quality; Batool spoke to us from one of the rare public venues in which it is possible to access the internet in Gaza; the connection was less than perfect and there is some background noise). Batool’s discussion of her new collection and the meaning of its title is at 16.46 and Batool and Marcia’s reading of the poem Milad/Birth is at 20.24. 

Show notes:

You can pre-order Batool’s 48kg from Tenement Press. It’s coming June 15. 

Batool also has poems in the new GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly  and in Modern Poetry in Translation’s Salam to Gaza.

Batool is one of the authors of Comma Press’s forthcoming Voices of Resistance, set to appear in August 2025.

You can also read work by Heba al-Agha at ArabLit.

You can donate to Batool’s GoFundMe at gofundme.com/f/donate-to-support-batools-cause

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at [email protected].

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Author, commentator and human rights advocate Khaled Mansour joins us to talk about how reading Arab women’s memoirs can help one gain a new understanding of the region’s collective history. After he worked with Egyptian psychoanalyst and feminist Afaf Mahfouz to write her autobiography, Mansour began a journey through Arab women’s memoirs set to culminate in his forthcoming podcast, المرآة (The Mirror). One of the many books he discusses with us is Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled’s account of her life and militancy, published in 1973, My People Shall Live.

Show notes:

You can find Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live available free through the Internet Archive.

Afaf Mahfouz’s من الخوف إلى الحرية is available from Kotob Khan.

Links to Khaled Mansour’s work can be found on his website. 

Memoirs by Nawal El Saadawi, Arwa Saleh, Huda Shaarawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, Radwa Ashour are available in English translation. A list of these and more is available at arablit.org. 

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at [email protected].

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Journalist, novelist, and memoirist Omar El Akkad talks about his latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – a blend of memoir, social criticism, and moral philosophy. The book creates and shares space for everyone who is full of grief and rage, who cannot be at home in institutions that support or ignore genocide. We discuss the linguistic obfuscations around Gaza, El Akkad’s critique of Western liberalism, and the possibilities for a different future.

Show notes:

You can get One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This from Penguin Random House, where a sample of the audiobook is available, read by Omar El Akkad.

Omar’s first novel, American War, is also available from Penguin Random.

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at [email protected].

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Journalist, author and editor Alia Malek tells us about her recent visit to Damascus and about the anthology of Syrian writing she edited for McSweeneys. Aftershocks was released in December 2024, just days after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and the country's political prisons began to crack open. The collection brings together work by sixteen Syrian authors who write from diasporic and refugee experience, as well as from inside Syria. We discuss these key Syrian literary voices and how they and others are meeting this moment.

Show notes:

Get the Aftershocks anthology from McSweeney’s at store.mcsweeneys.net.

Malek’s 2017 book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, is available from Bold Type Books.

Read Malek’s reflections on the death of her father, “‘He Didn’t Want to Lie in a Grave That Couldn’t Be Visited” and her recent “What Did the World Learn From Syria?” in the New York Times.

Read a short conversation with Aftershocks contributor Rawaa Sonbol, “On Being a Writer in Syria Today” and her short story “The Noose Boy,” both at ArabLit.

We mention the late Syrian writers Khaled Khalifa and Saadallah Wannous. 

The photo of Alia Malek in Damascus in January 2025 is by Sabir Hasko. 

You can subscribe to BULAQ on all your favorite podcast networks. You can also follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books, where we post about upcoming episodes and literary events.

Please don’t forget to rate and recommend BULAQ.

We are a non-profit, listener-supported program. If you’d like to make a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

BULAQ is a co-production with the podcast platform Sowt.

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Comics artist Rawand Issa joins us to talk about her book Inside the Giant Fish (trans. Amy Chiniara, Maamoul Press); her path from journalism to graphic art; artist groups and collectives across the region; the “new school of Arab comics,” and the challenges of making a living as a comics artist. We also talk about a few other Lebanese graphic novels, particularly Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, and Lena Merhej’s I Think We’ll Be Calmer in the Next War.

Show Notes:

You can find several of Rawand’s books available from Maamoul Press: http://maamoulpress.com. 

Also read Rawand’s “Being Illegal is Unbearable at The Nib, her  ماذا نفعل في مواجهة استمرار العنف ضد النساء؟ at Jeem and her untitled work in Chime.

And if you missed it, there’s a discussion with Rawand and translator Amy Chiniara about Inside the Giant Fish at ArabLit.

Samandal magazine is on Instagram (@samandalcomics), and you can find them at samandal-comics.org.

You can buy copies of the magazine Corniche at the Sharjah Art Foundation website.

Lab619 (@lab619), Skefkef (@skefkefmag/), and Fanzeen Comics (@fanzeencomics/) are on Instagram, while TokTok has a website, toktokmag.com.

Rawand Issa (@rawand.issa_) and Amy Chiniara (@amychiniara) are both on Instagram, too.

Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, from Pluto Press

Lena Merhej’s We Will Be Calmer in the Next War is available online.

Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

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In this episode, we talk through some literary news from Algeria and France, discuss two big translations out this fall from towering authors, as well as a new favorite by Maya Abu al-Hayyat. Then we turn to Read Palestine Week and the new collection focused on writers in Gaza, And Still We Write, before a discussion on refusing to work with Israeli publishers that are complicit in the violence against Palestinians. 

Show notes:

Author Kamel Daoud sued over claim he used life of wife’s patient in novel (The Guardian)

An excerpt from Aziz Binebine’s own account of Tazmamart, translated by Lulu Norman (WWB). Binebine’s story was the basis for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light.

Radwa Ashour’s classic Granada Trilogy is finally out in its complete form, in Kay Heikkenen’s translation. You can find the launch discussion at the AUC Press YouTube.

The late Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, translated by the late Humphrey Davies, was published in November by Archipelago Books.

Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s soon-to-be-classic No One Knows Their Blood Type is out in Hazem Jamjoum’s vibrant translation this fall, from Ohio State University Press

You can get a free digital copy of And Still We Write from the ArabLit storefront, https://arablit.gumroad.com/ Those who want a print copy can get one through Mixam.

The letter on refusing to work with Israeli publishers complicit in violence against Palestinians is on the PalFest website.

Ahdaf Soueif responds to some criticism of the letter in the London Review of Books. 

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Today’s guest, Irene Lozano, is the director of a Spanish cultural institution, Casa Arabe. It received the 2024 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Cultural Personality of the Year. As we’ll discuss, Casa Arabe is a center of learning, discussion and exchange between Spain and Arab countries. It offers Arabic language classes and a myriad of cultural initiatives and programs, including hosting talks by many prominent Arab writers. In this episode, we discuss the connection between Arabic and Spanish culture, representations of the Arab world in Spain and much more. 

This episode of the BULAQ podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for the award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply. Find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

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