TMR Book Club Discusses Zahran AlQasmi’s “Honey Hunger” with translator Marilyn Booth
May 25 @ 19:00 - 20:00
Free
This month, join us online for a special discussion on Zahran AlQasmi’s “Honey Hunger” with translator Marilyn Booth. We meet online on Sunday, May 25th at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET. Moderated by TMR’s Managing Editor Rana Asfour.
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About the book:
A novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hope, written by an International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning author and an International Booker-prize winning translator.
Azzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching for wild hives, he encounters Thamna, a lone shepherd woman, on a mountain slope and is captivated by her and her honey-colored eyes.
Zahran Alqasmi’s masterful novel thrums forward with a subtle momentum. His lucid, poetic writing conveys a visceral sense of time and place, of the fragile ecologies inhabited by both bees and humans alike, in this intense and compelling novel of loss and hope.
Published by Hoopoe, 2025.
About the author & translator:
Zahran Alqasmi (Author) is an Omani poet and novelist, born in the Sultanate of Oman in 1974. Honey Hunger was his third of four published novels, and in 2023 he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for The Water Diviner. He has also published ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.
Marilyn Booth (Translated by) is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.
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This online event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.