Alaa Al Aswany: The Republic of False Tr...

For 14 years, Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar was imprisoned and tortured in a series of prisons. He found refuge in writing poetry. Now, the poems he wrote imagining the collapse of the regime are a reality. In December, 2024, the rule of Syria’s longtime president Bashar al Assad d ... Show More

Theatre of the Absurd was born postwar as a recoil against the violent fetish that totalitarian regimes had for “order.” For 75 years, absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco's plays have been running continuously in Paris. IDEAS contributor Danny Braun went to Paris to delve into Io ... Show More

From Greek to Arabic and then to Latin, translators in 8th-century Baghdad eventually brought to Europe the works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and others who became central pillars of Western thought. IDEAS explores what is known as the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement. *This ep ... Show More

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany about his latest novel which charts the country's social upheaval through the prism of Cairo's elite Automobile Club of Egypt. The foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson looks back at the Egyptian revol ... Show More

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswany about his bestselling novel The Yacoubian Building. It was the Arab world’s number-one bestseller for five years running after it was published in 2002. The Yacoubian Building interweaves the stories of a group of ... Show More

At this crucial moment in Egypt’s story, this month’s World Book Club talks to one of the country’s great writers, Ahdaf Soueif, about her internationally acclaimed novel The Map of Love.In her Booker-shortlisted bestseller Soueif weaves together two poignant stories separated by ... Show More

In 1960s Egypt, a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of ... Show More

In 1960s Egypt, a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of ... Show More

Three years ago Bill Law travelled to Egypt for Crossing Continents to meet five extraordinary women who were fighting for human rights and equal pay for women in Egypt. For this programme, Bill returns to Egypt to tell the story of the unfolding revolution through the eyes of th ... Show More

Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Dictatorship Syndrome (2019), gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series. Chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, Oxford) Alaa Al Aswany is Egypt’s most celebrated novelist and essayist whose books are runaway bestsellers ... Show More

Far in the distance, three colossal shapes tower over the desert horizon… In this episode, we travel to the Nile Valley, and tell the story of one of the most iconic cultures ever produced by humankind – the civilizations of ancient Egypt. I want to show how this series of relate ... Show More

Why aren't we seeing massive pro-Palest!ne demonstrations in Egypt, when we know an overwhelming majority of its people support the liberation of Palest!ne? Dr. Aida Seif El-Dawla, a retired psychiatrist and human rights defender conveys the sense of defeat and tragedy many progr ... Show More