Hayat and the Rain—fiction from Mona Alshammari
The power of the imagination may not be enough to save a young girl’s hopes when faced with rural poverty.
Mona Al-Shammari
Mona Al-Shammari (born 1966) is a Kuwaiti novelist and writer. She studied theater and drama at Kuwait University. Her first short stories were published in the late 1980s. She won a prize from the Emirati Writers’ Union, in 1990. Her novels include No Music in Al Ahmadi, which was adapted for the screen, and The Maids of the Shrine that was nominated for the Arabic Booker Prize.
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.