WRITING ACROSS BOUNDARIES: Queerness, Multilingualism, and Generational Clashes in Fiction

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Queerness, multilingualism, and generational clashes are some of the themes for this roundtable conversation celebrating The Markaz Review’s summer double literary issue. MK Harb from Beirut, Nektaria Anastasiadou from Istanbul, and Qais Akbar Omar from Kabul join The Markaz’s literary editor Malu Halasa. They will discuss the art of fiction, the universality of localism, and the challenges facing writers from the Middle East and beyond in western-centric publishing. Learn the secrets and techniques behind writing a compelling short story.

Join us for this roundtable discussion on Wednesday, August 14 at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET.

This program is online and free to the public. Don’t miss what promises to be a rich conversation about writing and publishing fiction. This roundtable is supported by grants from Hawthornden and Open Society Foundations.

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About the speakers:

Malu Halasa is the Literary Editor of The Markaz Review. Her latest anthology, Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art From the Women’s Protests in Iran was shortlisted for the 2024 Bread and Roses Prize for Radical Publishing, in the UK. She is co-editor, with Jordan Elgrably of Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader that will be published by Seven Stories Press in October. Her debut novel, Mother of All Pigs was reviewed by the New York Times as “a microcosmic portrait of … a patriarchal order in slow-motion decline.”

Read her editorial, “Why Summer Fiction? For the Wonders & Miracles” in our double summer fiction issue

MK Harb is a writer from Beirut. He received his graduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2018. Harb served as Editor-at-Large for Lebanon at Asymptote Journal (2020-2023), commissioning and writing pieces relating to Arab literature in translation. His fiction and nonfiction work has been published in The White Review, BOMB Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic, and Jadaliyya, among others.

Read “We Danced”—a story by MK Harb in TMR 43 SUMMER FICTION ’24

Nektaria Anastasiadou is the 2019 winner of the Zografeios Agon, a Greek-language literary award founded in 19th-century Constantinople. Her debut novel, A Recipe for Daphne, was shortlisted for the 2022 Runciman Award, longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award, and a finalist with an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her second novel, Στα Πόδια της Αιώνιας Άνοιξης/Beneath the Feet of Eternal Spring was written in Istanbul Greek, and published by Papadopoulos in 2023.

Dive into her story, “An Inherited Offense”—a Levantine story on the island of Leros in our summer fiction issue

Qais Akbar Omar is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers that has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden. Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan, and holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University. Omar has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Sunday Times, and the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, and published short stories in the Southern Review, Guernica, and elsewhere.

Discover his centerpiece story, “The Social Media Kids”—a short story by Qais Akbar Omar in our latest issue 

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