Search results for ""Author Samuel Shimon""

A fully revised third edition in translation of this best-selling 'gem of autobiographical writing' in the Arab world, by an author who has been called 'a relentless raconteur', 'a modern Odysseus', 'the Iraqi Don Quixote'. Providentially leaving Iraq just before Saddam Hussein installs himself as President, the Assyrian boy dreams of becoming a Hollywood film-maker after his hero John Ford, but after arrest and torture in Syria - accused of being a Jewish spy on account of his name, similar treatment in Jordan, and escaping execution in Lebanon by armed militia, he eventually lands up on the streets of Paris, where he meets up with Jean Valjean and tries to escape his fate as a homeless refugee with wit, humour and amorous adventures, all the while writing the story of his childhood, his deaf-mute father Kika, and film buff Kiryakos. After all his experiences, Samuel Shimon, 'the runaway from museums', writes an urgently needed and timely 'manifesto of tolerance'. Translated from the Arabic by Christina Phillips and Piers Amodia with the author

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Generation '56 features nine influential Arab voices, all born in 1956, all of whom grew up to become major beacons of modernity, intellectual freedom and creativity in the Arab world and who established important cultural initiatives. Plus works by five more Sudanese authors, two poet film-makers and two fiction writers.

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For Summer reading Banipal 47 ­– Fiction from Kuwait Fiction from Kuwait presents a selection of contemporary literature from the novels and short stories of 17 Kuwaiti authors. It spans the generations of literary voices, from the 1960s and the writings of Sulaiman al-Shatti, Ismail Fahd Ismail and Suleiman al-Khalifi, to works by Fatima Yousif al-Ali, Laila al-Othman, Waleed al-Rajeeb, Taleb Alrefai, Thuraya al-Baqsami and Fawziya Shuwaish al-Salem, and then to those of young authors Bothayna al-Essa, Saud al-Sanousi, Yousef Khalifa, Basima al-Enezi, Ali Hussain al-Felkawi, Hameady Hamood and Mona al-Shammari.Almost the entire issue is devoted to the fiction literary scene in Kuwait today – with background articles on the development of both the short story and the novel. It is a vibrant scene, with many of the authors creating narratives of continuous and diverse dialogues on many levels – person to person, person to place, person to memory, memory to place. They discuss issues of expectation and surprise, loss and denial, love and marriage, humour, satire and melancholy, family traditions and relations, social mores and taboos, different cultures, environments, generations and geographies.Among the book reviews in Banipal 47 are reviews of works by two winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction: Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal's winning novel Throwing Sparks, and The Mehlis Report by Lebanese novelist Rabee Jaber (his winning novel The Druze of Belgrade has yet to be translated). Photo-reports of literary achievements complete the issue – the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, the Abu Dhabi and Casablanca International Book Fairs, the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction award ceremony, and the Shubbak Festival of Contemporary Arab Culture in London.

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Marrakech is a city of narration, and Banipal 48 presents enthralling voices from the "kingdom of the improbable, one where reality is creatively rewritten", as Juan Goytisolo describes the city in his introduction to Marrakech: Open Secrets, the first text of the feature. We invite readers to partake in many sublime moments of the real and seemingly unreal through the writings of poets and authors from Marrakech: Yassin Adnan and Saad Sarhan, whose recent book Marrakech, Open Secrets, has been translated especially for this issue; the painter novelist Mahi Binebine, who never fails to captivate, and his new novel The Lord will reward you; Abu Youssef Taha brings a couple of black tales with a twist; Rajae Benchemsi writes of Bahia, the henna painter, and describes Marrakech as "a cosmic uterus"; Mohamed Nedali's fascinating debut novel Prime Cuts: An Apprentice Butcher's Life & Loves will at last be published in English; Anis Arafai gives readers three alternative short stories while Taha Adnan presents three scenarios on the lure of the East and "the winds of Westernization".We invite you enjoy this singular literary celebration of Morocco's Red City lying at the foot of the Atlas mountains and join us at the launch on 12 November.Banipal 48 also includes works by two more Moroccan authors, poets making waves – the well-known Mubarak Wassat, and newcomer Karima Nadir, writing about the coastal city of Casablanca. The Literary Influences essay by Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin admirably complements Narrating Marrakech. She explains how she was lured by her grandmother's storytelling to train her imagination "to swim in the trackless spaces of fantasy" and that she searched hard to find books to read "that did not recognize boundaries between reality and the imagination". A second Egyptian author is Ezzat El-Kamhawi, with an excerpt from his award-winning novel The House of El-Deeb, to be published in translation by AUC Press in December. Also, two Iraqi novelists – Duna Ghali, settled in Denmark and writing in Arabic, in this excerpt, set in Baghdad 2006, of a family that becomes unhinged, disintegrating through being victims of war trauma, and Pius Alibek from Barcelona, writing in Catalan, this excerpt from his novel Nomad Roots recalling an Iraqi soldier's struggle to exist in the southern desert.We are proud to collaborate with the Berlin International Literature Festival, which for each of its 13 years to date has opened up more and more the essential world of reading for children and young people, and through literary translation, each year gives us more and more "Literature of the World". In Banipal 48 we run a special feature on this year's guests, who include J M Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, the latter wowing his audience by saluting literary translation as "a miracle", as "the most unsung art in literature", and Arab authors, whose participation is now a regular feature of the festival.

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This is the last issue of Banipal, the independent literary magazine, marking 25 years of translating and publishing contemporary literature by Arab authors. Arabic literature will always need a magazine like Banipal. In fact, more than one. We're closing at No 75, not because the magazine is no longer necessary but because we, as central producers, can no longer continue to operate. We no longer have the physical energy necessary and believe that for the magazine to continue, there must be new blood, a young staff, with the same enthusiasm and conviction that we have had all these years. We leave behind a massive archive of literature by umpteen different authors and in different genres, opening up an endlessly enthralling world of Arabic literary works.

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Banipal 73 - Fiction Past and Present is a delicious mix of pioneering, emerging and established authors from around the Arab world. With short stories by three pioneering writers - Emile Habiby, Fuad al-Takarli and Mohamed Choukri and works by established novelists Ezzat el-Kamhawi (The Travellers' Room) and Emna Rmili (Beach of Souls). Also the first time in English translation for fiction writers Reem Al-Kamali, Mohammed Alnaas, Dima al-Choukr, Khalid Al-Nassrallah and Bushra Khalfan in our feature on the six shortlisted novels of the 2022 IPAF.

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Covid-19 is still with us, spreading its deathly virus, killing thousands, keeping us in our homes, making us keep our distance wherever we go, wearing masks whenever we might get within a metre or so of another person, and creating virtual, digital events. Over the months it has changed the world, and till now it’s hard to see an end to it. All our lives are being transformed by it.On 8 April, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award announced its 2020 winners – Banipal Magazine won the Publishing and Technology award. What a huge honour and accolade for this 23-year-old literary magazine. It is a tremendous boost to our very necessary translation project. We were pleased, also, to hear a mention of our new project of a second magazine – Revista Banipal for modern Arab literature in Spanish translation.Banipal 68 – Short Stories introduces 21 diverse, engaging and thoughtful stories, mostly for the first time in English. First, from the award ceremony of the Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story, there is winner Sheikha Helawy and finalists Sofiene Rajab, Sherif Saleh and Mahmoud Al-Rahbi, and then three further great short story writers, Muhammad Khudayyir , Mustafa Taj Aldeen Almosa and Mohammed Al-Sharekh. Plus chapters from two novels – Free Fall by Abeer Esber and A Small Death by Mohammed Hasan Alwan. Plus works by two major poets – Moncef Ouhaibi, winner of the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature, and Abdo Wazen. Plus interview with Mohamed Berrada and essay by Bothayna al-Essa on her writings. And letters from Ghassan Kanafani to Denys Johnson-Davies. A HUGE THANKS to all our contributors who have continued working from home under coronavirus restrictions, and to our socially-distancing printer and distributor.

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Banipal 69 opens by saluting in texts by two of its major authors, the city of Beirut that was devastated by the calamitous explosion at its port on 4 August: Beirutshima is a resounding and moving poem by the poet Abdo Wazen that describes vividly and painfully the sudden and awful moments of the destruction as “tongues of hellfire shot out” … “in a nightmare moment like eternity”, in a brilliant translation by Paul Starkey. Elias Khoury’s essay The City of Strangers begins by looking at the metaphor of Beirut as an apple, from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Beirut”, although it was “born a pine tree on the shores of the Mediterranean”, and how the explosion then sees “the monster bite through the metaphor’s back and tear the metaphor to pieces.”The main feature introduces nine new Arabic novels by authors from Tunisia, Oman, Bahrain, Algeria, Sudan, Qatar and Egypt. In a change from including a brief synopsis of a novel with the excerpts in translation, in this issue eight novels are fully reviewed alongside the translated excerpts while one includes an interview with the author.

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This unique feature on Iraqi Jewish writers includes short stories, excerpts from novels, and poems – written by 17 authors – all of whom are of Iraqi descent. For several centuries, Iraqi Jews were key contributors to Iraq’s rich social and cultural tapestry – active in all areas of life as novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, musicians, composers, singers, and artists. Sadly, all this came to a tragic end with the massive transfer-emigration and forced displacement of Iraqi Jews in the 1950s to Israel. The feature also includes introductory essays about the authors and poets, who are of different generations, traversing a wide range of languages – from the poetry of the Mani brothers at the turn of the 20th century to the works of Almog Behar and Mati Shemoelof in the early noughties. The texts raise universal questions of belongingness, exile, diaspora, cross-national affinities, and cross-linguistic possibilities. All texts were either translated directly from Arabic (approximately two-thirds) or from Hebrew, with one written originally in English.

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Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist presents a major feature on the celebrated Lebanese and international author, with excerpts from his latest novel Stella Maris, the second in the Children of the Ghetto trilogy, and a chapter from his first novel (until now not translated), plus in-depth articles on the corpus of novels including translations of his works into Hebrew, and reviews of his early novels. • We bid Adieu to poet Amjad Nasser in Fakhri Saleh’s essay on his poetry collections. • We introduce two winners of the Moroccan Argana International Poetry Prize – Wadih Saadeh and Hawad. • Also featured are the six shortlisted novels of the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. • Plus works by two well-known Iraqi writers: Muhammad Khudayyir and Muhsin al-Musawi – and poems by three young poets from Lebanon, Palestine and Tunisia. MANY THANKS to all our contributors, authors, translators, and editors, who have been working from home under coronavirus restrictions.

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Banipal 71 Salutes Ihsan Abdel Kouddous commemorates two great Arab authors and introduces new literature in translation, plus reviews and photo report. We say “Farewell” to the inimitable Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, “the last communist”, who passed away on 13 June. In a special feature we salute the prolific Egyptian writer Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–1990), whose stories and novels were adapted into dozens of films, but hardly translated into English. With articles and translations from three of his works, Hassouna Mosbahi writes: “It would be no exaggeration to equate Abdel Kouddous’ daring and braveness with that of great writers from the West who challenged all forms of censorship imposed on subjects related to love and sexuality”. Translations and reviews of two new novels: Cinderellas of Muscat by Huda Hamed (Oman), and Things I left Behind by Shada Mustafa (Palestine) Poems from Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha, founder of the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza A travelling tale, The Calligrapher of Kufa, from Mohammed al-Sharekh

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A collaboration with London’s SAFAR film festival in September featuring book and film pairs, translations, presentations, interview with director Daoud Abdel Sayed of the famous Egyptian film Kit Kat. Plus authors Azouz Begag, Lutfiya al-Dulaimi, Ahmad Ali El-Zein, Abdelrashid Mahmoudi and Liana Badr, and Morocco’s 40th Assilah Festival.

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