27: Where Do I Start?

We talk about a newly released collection of five compelling and highly quotable interviews with the great late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, titled Palestine as Metaphor, translated by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché. We also talk about recent protests in Lebanon and how th ... Show More

In the first half of the episode, we paid tribute to Jordanian poet, activist, novelist, travel writer, and editor Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who died at the end of October. In the second, we talked about the political space occupied by Moroccan-French writers Tahar Ben Jelloun an ... Show More

We discuss two novels set in Iraq -- one featuring a despondent policeman, and one featuring a determined grandma and her donkey. Also, how John Updike once dismissed the great Saudi writer Abdelrahman Mounif as "insufficiently Westernized" to write a novel. 

Traces of Enayat (Transit Books, 2023) is a work of creative nonfiction tracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine. It begins in Cairo, 1963. Four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life ... Show More

‏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 autob ... Show More

A supremely creative, endlessly curious individual—that’s how we would describe Ahmad Swaid. It’s high praise but well-deserved for the new founding Editor in Chief of Dazed Middle East. Born in London to parents from Sierra Leone and Lebanon, Ahmad grew up traversing these space ... Show More

Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, Jonathan Smolin, discusses his book "The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser," which examines the life and work of Ihsan Abdel Quddous who played an immens ... Show More

Kevin Jones talked about poetry in the Middle East and his book, The Dangers of Poetry, which is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the region through their function as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq.Kevin Jon ... Show More

One of the world’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie has won many prestigious international literary awards and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, a novel that was also twice voted as the best of all-time Boo ... Show More

Habibi Festival is back for another year at Joe's Pub, bringing Arabs, comrades, and lovers of music together in New York in these difficult times that our nations continue to endure. And for another year, afikra was on stage to speak to the musicians and bring their conversation ... Show More

Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated (U California Press, 2025), edited by Collective Antigone, is a groundbreaking collection of writings by political prisoners in Egypt. It offers a unique lens on the global rise of authoritarianism during the last decad ... Show More

In this Matbakh event, we talked to Omar Sartawi about his creations and subtle blend of flavors from his travels to Europe and the Arab Gulf with his heritage and Jordanian roots. Omar’s popular consecration came in 2017, when he took the local food scene by storm with the launc ... Show More

In this Matbakh event, we talked to Charles Perry about his career as a translator of several medieval cookbooks from Arabic to English and published widely on the history of food. In 2005 Perry translated from Arabic A Baghdad Cookery Book, also known as Al-Baghdadi’s Kitab al-T ... Show More