Laila Al Othman

Laila al-Othman is a prominent Kuwaiti author, her writings on social and literary issues first appearing in local newspapers in 1965. She has 14 collections of short stories and nine novels, her best-known, Wasmiya takhruju min al-Bahr [Wasmiyya Comes Out of the Sea] was published in 1986 and translated into Italian and Russian. It was on the Arab Writers’ Union’s list of the 100 best Arab novels of the 20th century. Some stories have been translated into French, Spanish, Yugoslavian, Polish, Russian, German and Albanian. In 2004, she founded the Laila al-Othman Award for Young Creative Talent in Fiction, a literary prize awarded biennially to young Kuwaiti men and women writers.

Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy, an Egyptian literary translator and academic, is an assistant lecturer in the English Department, Faculty of Arts, Fayoum University, Egypt. His translations have appeared in ArabLit Quarterly, Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and elsewhere. His first monograph, Belonging to Prison, will be published by Cambridge Scholars in the summer. In 2023, he finished a six-month mentorship with the British National Centre for Writing as part of their Emerging Literary Translators program, where he was mentored by Sawad Hussain.