TMR Book Club Discusses Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library,” translated by Sawad Hussain & Ranya Abdelrahman
June 29 @ 19:00 - 20:00
Free
Join The Markaz Review’s Book Club on Sunday, June 29th at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET to dive into Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library,” translated by Sawad Hussain & Ranya Abdelrahman. Hosted by TMR’s Managing Editor, Rana Asfour.
About the book:
A national book award finalist, the novel is a reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees. Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Guardian of Surfaces is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.
The new book censor has not slept soundly in weeks. By day, he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night, pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter, and the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.
About the author & the translators:
Bothayna Al-Essa (author) is the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional children’s books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. Her most recent book, The Book Censor’s Library, won the Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category in 2021 and is her third novel to appear in English, after Lost in Mecca and All That I Want to Forget. Al-Essa was author-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation for the summer of 2023, and the recipient of Kuwait’s Nation Encouragement Award for her fiction in 2003 and 2012. She has written books on writing and led writing workshops throughout the Arab world.
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work in 2023 was shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and longlisted for The Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation (2024 cycle). Her most recent translations include Edo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano (Dedalus Books), Djinn’s Apple by Djamila Morani (Neem Tree Press).
Ranya Abdelrahman is a translator of Arabic literature into English. After working for more than 16 years in the information technology industry, she changed careers to pursue her interest in books, promoting reading and translation. Abdelrahman has published translations in ArabLit Quarterly, The Markaz Review, and The Common, and is the translator of Out of Time, a short story collection by Palestinian author Samira Azzam.
This online event is open and free to the public. Registration is required. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.