The Markaz Review

TMR Conversations: Resistance in the Face of Annihilation
2024-02-22 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
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Layla Maghribi interviews Palestinian filmmakers Hind Shoufani and Saeed Taji Farouky on activism and art in Palestinian filmmaking today, and on the role of Palestinian artists in the resistance movement, as well as how to push back against anti-Arab and Palestinian cancellation and censorship in today’s super-charged media landscape.
Layla will interview Hind and Saeed live on February 22nd at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK. This online event is open to all and free to the public; donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.
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About the speakers
Layla Maghribi is a British Arab journalist, currently based in the UK after several years in the Middle East working for international media outlets, including Reuters and CNN International. Raised in England, Layla has lived in Italy, Syria, Lebanon and the UAE, and has a special interest in social issues affecting Arabic-speaking communities, particularly in relation to culture, immigration and mental health. She is a correspondent with The National News based in London. You can read more of her work here or on Twitter @layla_maghribi.
Hind Shoufani is has been a filmmaker, writer and poet for the past 25 years. She recently won a BAFTA for the Oscar-nominated short film “The Present,” and her latest documentary, Heavy Metal, premiered at the Tribeca Film
Festival in 2023. Her first feature film Trip Along Exodus screened in over 30 countries. She is a Fulbright scholar from Jordan, with an MFA in film from The Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Hind has won awards for her personal and professional achievements, helmed commercial projects for corporate and NGO clients, and influenced the literary cultural scene in the SWANA region through events, mentorship & publications. She has published creative essays, prose and poetry in numerous international journals, magazines and anthologies.
Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian-Egyptian-British filmmaker, educator, and curator. His documentary A Thousand Fires won the Marco Zucchi award for most innovative documentary in the Directors Fortnight of the 2021 Locarno Film Festival. A previous documentary Tell Spring Not to Come This Year premiered at the Berlinale 2015 and won the Audience Choice Panorama Award and the Amnesty Human Rights Award. He runs the Radical Film School in London, a free film course for participants from backgrounds underrepresented in the film industry.
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TMR Book Club Discusses "Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protest in Iran" with editor Malu Halasa
2024-02-25 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
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We are on the one-year anniversary of the women’s freedom marches in Iran.
Jina Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of Iran’s Morality Police on 16th of September, 2022 sparked widespread protests across the country. Women took to the streets, uncovering their hair, burning headscarves and chanting “Woman Life Freedom’ — ‘Zan Zendegi Azadi” in Persian and “Jin Jîyan Azadî” in Kurdish — in mass demonstrations. An explosion of creative resistance followed as art and photography shared online went viral and people around the world saw what was really going on in Iran.
Woman Life Freedom captures this historic moment in artwork and first-person accounts. This striking collection goes behind the scenes at forbidden fashion shows; records the sound of dissent in Iran where it is illegal for women to sing unaccompanied in public; and walks the streets of Tehran with ‘The Smarties’ — Gen Z women who colour and show their hair in defiance of the authorities, despite the potentially devastating consequences. Extolling the power of art, writing and body politics — both female and queer — this collection is a universal rallying call and a celebration of the women the regime has tried and failed to silence.
Published by Saqi Books, London. We meet the editor, Malu Halasa, to talk about the book online, on Sunday, Feb. 25 at 1 pm Eastern/19:00 CET.
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TMR Conversations: Rula Jebreal on the Present Moment
2024-03-07 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
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Join us on March 7th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK for an interview organized by TMR’s Editor-in-Chief Jordan Elgrably with Rula Jebreal about what it means to be a Palestinian writer in an era when Palestinian writers and journalists are considered by Israel to be enemies of the state. Jebreal will address the reality in Gaza and the West Bank, and where we go from here.
This online event is free and open to the public. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.
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About the speaker
Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, author, and foreign policy analyst renowned for her groundbreaking work in Europe, the United States, and across the Middle East. Jebreal’s diverse body of work reflects her life-long engagement with topics that have directly impacted her life, both personally and professionally, from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the war on terror, and global far right movements rising throughout Europe and the United States. Jebreal has also grappled with the the war on truth, propaganda and conspiracy theories, and in fact for the past five years has been teaching a course at the University of Miami, entitled “Persuasion, Propaganda, and Genocide.” She is an international bestselling author, whose novel Miral, among other works, has been translated into more than 14 languages. Jebreal is a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami, and serves on the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council, a body relaunched in 2018 by French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as the Advisory Board of The U.S./Middle East Project. She is fluent in Italian, English, Hebrew, and Arabic.
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TMR 39 • BURN IT ALL DOWN Roundtable Discussion
2024-03-21 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
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The Markaz Review presents a conversation around TMR 39’s theme, BURN IT ALL DOWN, in which senior editor Lina Mounzer talks to three of the issue’s contributors on their essays.
In her editorial, “Why Burn It All Down?”, Mounzer quoted the poetry of John Donne and suggested that the Gaza genocide represents “a collective diminishment” of us all — westerners and easterners alike, while in her essay “The Time of Monsters,” Layla AlAmmar took inspiration from several Arab poets, including Khalil Gibran, as well as writers Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, and argued that Hamas was trying “to stop the Nakba.” In “Al-Thakla—Arabic as the Original Mourner,” Abdelrahman ElGendy struggles with wishing to express himself in Arabic while admitting that English holds more currency; he argues that “English does not give me a seat at the table [but] offers me the chance to point at the table.” ElGendy asks: “How do you hold your grief in a language that’s been its main perpetrator?” And Michelle Eid in her essay “Israel’s Environmental and Economic War on Lebanon” suggests that Israel isn’t only at war with the Palestinians, but perhaps the entire region. What needs to be dismantled or destroyed before a new world can be ushered in? This conversation gives the microphone to a younger Arab generation who, though perfectly fluent in English, takes issue with western hegemonic discourse.
This roundtable discussion will take place online on March 21st at 2pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK. This event is open and free to the public. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.
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About the speakers:
LINA MOUNZER is a Lebanese writer and translator. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is a senior editor at The Markaz Review.
Read her editorial in our March issue, TMR 39 • BURN IT ALL DOWN: Why “Burn it All Down”?
LAYLA ALAMMAR is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She earned a PhD in Arab women’s fiction and literary trauma theory, and she has an MSc in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made (2019), was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Her second novel, Silence is a Sense (2021), was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She has written for The Guardian, LitHub, the Times Literary Supplement, ArabLit Quarterly, The New Arab, GQ Middle East, and NewLines Magazine.
Read her essay in our March issue, TMR 39 • BURN IT ALL DOWN: The Time of Monsters
ABDELRAHMAN ELGENDY is a Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nonfiction Writing MFA, and a Heinz fellow at Pitt’s Global Studies Center. His work has received awards or fellowships from Logan Nonfiction Program, Tin House Workshop, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.
Read his centerpiece essay in our March issue, TMR 39 • BURN IT ALL DOWN: Al-Thakla—Arabic as the Original Mourner
MICHELLE EID is a researcher, consultant, and editor. Her areas of interest are socio-economic rights and development, focusing on agriculture and food sovereignty in the Levant. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Al Rawiya, a magazine focused on the Levant region.
Read her essay in our March issue, TMR 39 • BURN IT ALL DOWN: Israel’s Environmental and Economic Warfare on Lebanon

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TMR Book Club Discusses "The Applicant" with author Nazli Koca
2024-03-31 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Join TMR’s Book Club on March 31st at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET to discuss Nazli Koca’s “The Applicant” and meet the author.
About the book:
It’s 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.
Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm’s reach—writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home—Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin’s nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and—against her political convictions and better judgment—begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father’s ghost still haunting their lives?
While she waits for the German court’s verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. “The Applicant” is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut.
About the author:
Nazlı Koca is a writer and poet from Turkey who now lives in the US. Her writing has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Bookforum, and Second Factory, among other outlets. “The Applicant” is her first novel.
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Table ronde autour du Numéro 40 PARIS du point de vue de ses créatifs issus des mondes arabes
2024-04-18 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Nous avons le plaisir de réunir 3 contributeurs de notre numéro de Paris pour discuter de leurs récits et portraits ainsi que de leur quotidien dans la capitale.
Nous vous donnons rendez-vous le jeudi 18 avril à 19h sur Zoom pour un moment d’échange et une invitation à revisiter ensemble la ville d’un point de vue oriental.
Ce numéro donne la parole à de nombreuses diasporas des mondes arabes dont l’histoire se mêle avec la ville des lumières.
Découvrez les écrits de nos trois invités:
Coline Houssais nous partage en exclusivité la genèse de son ouvrage Paris en lettres arabes qui sortira en mai prochain aux éditions Actes Sud.
Wanis El Kabbaj nous livre un témoignage intime de la vie de son père à Paris intitulé Heureux comme un Arabe à Paris.
Sasha Moujaes nous conte un portrait passionnant d’Ariella Aïsha Azoulay en lien avec son dernier livre La résistance des bijoux aux éditions Rot Bo Krik : Depuis Paris, défaire les géographies coloniales.
Retrouvez l’éditorial de notre rédacteur en chef Jordan Elgrably: Pourquoi Paris?
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Coline Houssais
Née en Bretagne, Coline Houssais est une auteure, commissaire et chercheuse indépendante spécialisée dans l’histoire culturelle de l’immigration maghrébine et proche-orientale en Europe ainsi que dans les musiques du monde arabe. Diplômée de Sciences Po, l’Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas, l’INALCO et la London School of Economics, elle enseigne à Sciences Po. Fondatrice de l’Agence Ustaza à Paris, elle est également résidente de la Fondation Camargo (2020) et du programme de résidence IMéRA-MUCEM (2021). Ses dernières publications incluent une anthologie de la musique arabe (“Musiques du Monde Arabe, une anthologie en 100 artistes”, Le Mot et le Reste, 2020) et une participation aux deux premiers volumes d’Araborama (Institut du Monde Arabe/Seuil).

Sasha Moujaes
Originaire de Beyrouth, Sasha Moujaes est actuellement basée à Paris. Diplômée de Sciences Po et de l’Institut national des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), elle s’est spécialisée en sociologie politique avec un intérêt particulier pour les mondes arabo-méditerranéens. Après plusieurs années d’expérience dans le secteur culturel, elle s’engage aujourd’hui dans des projets associatifs au croisement des enjeux LBGTQI+ et de migration.

Wanis El Kabbaj
Né à Paris, et de nationalité franco-marocaine, Wanis El Kabbaj a 25 ans d’expérience en marketing sur 4 continents. Ayant grandi dans une famille férue de littérature et autour des livres d’Amine Maalouf, Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz, il a développé une profonde appréciation pour les récits puissants, les phrases ciselées et les mots justes. C’est cet amour qui l’a poussé à donner deux TED Talks sur l’avenir des transports urbains et la relation ambivalente entre les nationalismes et la mondialisation qui ont recueilli 6 millions de vues dans le monde entier. Wanis est passionné de diversité culturelle, qu’il expérimente au quotidien dans sa propre famille et milite pour l’émergence de sociétés inclusives, humanistes et ouvertes.
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TMR Book Club Discusses "A Nearby Country Called Love" with author Salar Abdoh
2024-04-24 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
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Join the TMR Book Club on Wednesday, April 24th at 7pm CET/ 1pm EST/ 6pm UK to discuss “A Nearby Country Called Love” online with the author, Salar Abdoh.
About the book:
A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which a man struggles to find his place in an Iran on the brink of combusting.
Amid the alleyways of the Zamzam neighborhood of Tehran, a woman lights herself on fire in a desperate act of defiance, setting off a chain reaction of violence and protest. Haunted by the woman’s death, Issa is forced to confront the contradictions of his own family history, throughout which his late brother Hashem, a prominent queer artist in Tehran’s underground, defied their father, a skilled martial artist bound to traditional notions of honor and masculinity.
Issa soon finds himself thrown into a circle of people living on the margins of society, negotiating a razor-like code of conduct that rewards loyalty and encourages aggression and intolerance in equal measure. As the city explodes around him, Issa realizes that it is the little acts of kindness that matter most, the everyday humanity of individuals finding love and doing right by one another.
Vibrant and evocative, intimate and intelligent, A Nearby Country Called Love is both a captivating window into contemporary Iran and a portrait of the parallel fates of a man and his country—a man who acknowledges the sullen and rumbling baggage of history but then chooses to step past its violent inheritance. Published by Viking.

About the author:
Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the author of the novels Tehran at Twilight, The Poet Game, Opium, and Out of Mesopotamia and the editor of Tehran Noir. He teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.
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U.S. Book Tour: "Stories from the Center of the World" with editor Jordan Elgrably and contributing writers
2024-05-09 19:00 - 2024-05-22 18:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
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🗓️ WHAT: Book launch of new Middle East fiction anthology
🗣️ WHO: Editor Jordan Elgrably and various writers read from Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction
📍 WHERE: San Francisco, Berkeley, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Washington DC, New York City. Each city has its own event link:

MAY 9 (In-person & online) San Francisco, City Lights, with Sarah AlKahly-Mills, 7 pm: https://citylights.com/events/jordan-elgrably/
MAY 10 (In-person) Berkeley, Books Inc with Sarah AlKahly-Mills, 6 pm: https://www.booksinc.net/event/jordan-elgrably-books-inc-berkeley
MAY 11 (In-person) Sacramento, Capital Books, 5 pm: https://capitalbooksonk.com/jordan-elgrably
MAY 16 (In-person) Los Angeles, Beyond Baroque with Reza Sixo Safai, 8 pm: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/la-launch-stories-from-the-center-of-the-world-new-middle east-fiction-tickets-880484200947?aff=oddtdtcreator
MAY 17 (In-person) Las Vegas with Ahmed Naji, The Writers Block, 7 pm: https://www.thewritersblock.org/events/upcoming-events
MAY 20 (In-person) Chicago at Northwestern University Sahar Mustafah, 4 pm: https://planitpurple.northwestern.edu/event/615352 & https://www.facebook.com/events/1656522558491274/
MAY 21 (In-person & online) Washington DC, Busboys and Poets, with Natasha Tynes, 6 pm: https://www.busboysandpoets.com/events/th-evt-38480538/
MAY 22 (In-person) NYC at the NYPL Tompkins Square, 6 pm with Omar El Akkad: https://arteeast.org/news-events/stories-from-the-center-of-the-world-readings-from-jordan-elgrably-and-omar-el-akkad/

Join us for the "Stories of the Center of the World" Book Tour from May 9-22!Celebrate the launch of "Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction," published by City Lights, with editor Jordan Elgrably and contributing writers.Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Which event(s) will you be joining us for? *May 9 - City Lights (San Francisco) with Jordan Elgrably and Sarah AlKahly-MillsMay 10 - Books Inc (Berkeley) with Jordan Elgrably and Sarah AlKahly-MillsMay 11 - Capital Books (Sacramento) with Jordan ElgrablyMay 16 - Beyond Baroque (Los Angeles) with Jordan Elgrably and Reza Sixo SafaiMay 17 - The Writers Block (Las Vegas) with Jordan Elgrably and Ahmed NajiMay 20 - Northwestern University (Chicago) with Jordan Elgrably and Sahar MustafahMay 21 - Busboys and Poets (Washington DC) with Jordan Elgrably and Natasha TynesMay 22 - NYPL Tompkins Square (NYC) with Jordan Elgrably and Omar El AkkadPlease select the date and location that you plan to attend from the drop-down list above, you can select multiple options.RSVP
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Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world.
“Provocative and subtle, nuanced and surprising . . . these stories demonstrate how this complicated and rich region might best be approached— through the power of literature…” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed
Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the greater Middle East or SWANA — a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name a few.
In “Asha and Haaji,” Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektaria Anastasiadou’s “The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,” two students in Istanbul from different classes—and religions that have often been at odds with one another—believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb’s story, “Counter Strike,” is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents, and Salar Abdoh’s “The Long Walk of the Martyrs” invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, and are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In “Eleazar,” Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists—Israeli occupation forces—are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad’s “The Icarist” is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away.

JORDAN ELGRABLY is a Franco-American and Moroccan writer and translator, whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and The Paris Review. He is the editor of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights 2024) and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumūd: a New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories Press 2024). Elgrably founded and edits The Markaz Review.

TMR 41 • FORGETTING Roundtable Discussion
2024-05-16 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Join us online on Thursday, May 16th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK for our May roundtable discussion which invites four contributors to TMR 41, FORGETTING, to a conversation around the culture of memory and forgetting in the Arab world.
As Mai Al Nakib asserts in her essay, “Writing is a memory archive, [providing] a portal to lost time, to fading traces of existence.” And this archive created and maintained by writers is often preserved against/in contradiction to/in defiance of/in resistance to and in spite of the approved narratives of the State. And so, four writers from four different Arab countries, each with its own traumatic and turbulent relationship to memory and forgetfulness—Nabil Salih, from Iraq, Mai Al Nakib, from Kuwait, Saleem Haddad, from Palestine via Lebanon, and Asmaa El Gamal, from Egypt—sit down with senior editor Lina Mounzer, from Lebanon, to talk about those relationships and to discuss how personal memory might act upon the historical record.
Read this month’s editorial by Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably, “Why FORGETTING?”.
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About the speakers:
Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is a senior editor at The Markaz Review.

Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London; Edinburgh; and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University. She was an Associate Professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University, where she taught for twenty years; she recently left this position to write full-time. Her research focuses on cultural politics in the Middle East, with a special emphasis on gender, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial issues. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. It won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. Her debut novel, An Unlasting Home—published by Mariner Books in the US and Saqi in the UK—came out in paperback in April 2023. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter; The First Line; After the Pause; World Literature Today; Rowayat; New Lines Magazine; and the BBC World Service. She divides her time between Kuwait and Greece.
Read her centerpiece essay in this month’s issue, “Memory Archive: Between Remembering and Forgetting.”

Saleem Haddad is a novelist, screenwriter, and essayist currently based in Lisbon, with roots in Amman, Beirut, and London. His award-winning debut novel, Guapa, was published in 2016.
Read his book review of “My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine” in our May issue.

Asmaa Elgamal is a writer and scholar from Alexandria, Egypt. She earned her PhD in International Development and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research explored the colonial and military histories of spatial planning in the Middle East and North Africa. Her writing has appeared in New Lines Magazine, Contingent Magazine, and Insider. She was also longlisted for the 2021 DISQUIET International Literary Prize for Non-Fiction.
Read her essay, “The Elephant in the Box” in this month’s issue.

Nabil Salih is a writer and photographer from Baghdad who holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown and is pursuing a second MA in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. His writings appear in Jadaliyya, Allegra Lab, Al Jazeera English and LeftEast among others, and have been translated to Italian, Spanish, French and other languages.
Read his essay, “Regarding the Photographs of Others—An Iraqi Journey Toward Remembering” in our latest issue.

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Carte Blanche : Dialogue entre Alain Damasio et Karim Kattan
2024-05-19 17:30 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Espace Albertine Sarrazin – Promenade du Peyrou, Montpellier, 34000, France
Nous avons le plaisir de vous retrouver le 19 mai 2024 dans le cadre de la Comédie du Livre à 17h30 pour une carte blanche d’Alain Damasio avec le poète et romancier palestinien Karim Kattan. L’occasion de découvrir ou redécouvrir son premier roman paru aux Éditions Elyzad, Le palais des deux collines.
Une rencontre organisée par The Markaz Review en partenariat avec le salon de la Comédie du Livre de Montpellier.
Cet événement prendra place dans l’espace Albertine Sarrazin – Promenade du Peyrou.
En savoir plus de Karim Kattan :
Karim Kattan est un écrivain palestinien, né à Jérusalem en 1989. Il est titulaire d’un doctorat en littérature comparée de Paris Nanterre et écrit en anglais et en français. En français, ses livres comprennent un recueil de nouvelles, Préliminaires pour un verger futur (2017), et un roman, Le Palais des deux collines (2021), tous deux publiés par les Éditions Elyzad, basées à Tunis. Le Palais des deux collines a reçu le Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie en 2021 et a été présélectionné pour de nombreux autres prix. En anglais, son travail est paru notamment dans The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, The Maine Review, +972 Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge et The Funambulist . Kattan a été l’un des cofondateurs et directeurs d’el-Atlal, une résidence d’art et d’écriture dans l’oasis de Jéricho (Palestine).
Parcourir ses contributions pour The Markaz Review:

Comment Bethléem est passée de l’arrière-pays endormi de Jérusalem à une ville mondiale
“Eleazar” – une nouvelle de Karim Kattan
Karim Kattan : “Le fossoyeur”

En savoir plus de Alain Damasio :
Alain Damasio est un écrivain de science-fiction français. Son domaine de prédilection est l’anticipation politique. Il marie ce genre à des éléments de science-fiction ou de fantasy et décrit des dystopies politiques.

TMR Book Club Discusses “Where the Wind Calls Home” with the author Samar Yazbek
2024-05-29 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Join TMR’s Book Club on Wednesday, May 29th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK to discuss “Where the Wind Calls Home” with the author Samar Yazbek on Zoom. In this new novel by Syria’s most prominent writer of the National Book Award “Finalist Planet of Clay,” a wounded nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian Army remembers his life lived in the traditional Alawite way.
In this new novel by Syria’s most prominent writer of the National Book Award Finalist Planet of Clay, a wounded nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian Army remembers his life lived in the traditional Alawite way.
Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole–is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there … While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.
Published by World Editions. Translated by Leri Price.
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About the author:
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. She was born in Jableh, Syria, near Latakia, in 1970, and studied Arabic literature at Latakia university.

Yazbek has been a prominent voice in support of human rights and more specifically women’s rights in Syria. In 2012, she launched Women Now for Development, an NGO based in France that aims at empowering Syrian women economically and socially and at educating children.

In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the 39 most promising authors under the age of 40, by Beirut39, a contest organized by the Hay Festival. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime, and was forced to exile a few months later. In 2012, she was chosen for the prestigious PEN/Pinter Prize “International writer of courage”, in recognition of her book “In the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution”. She was also awarded the Swedish Tucholsky Prize, and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize, in the following year. In 2016 Yazbek’s literary narrative “The Crossing” was awarded the prestigious French “Best Foreign Book” prize. Her novel, “The blue pen”, was in the third and final selection of the French Femina award, and was shortlisted to the National Book Award, New York under the title “Planet of Clay” in 2021.
In 2019, Samar Yazbek was attributed the honorary citizenship by the City of Palermo. And in 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of its 12 International W1riters, along with Anne Carson, Maryse Condé, Yoko Ogawa and Juan Gabriel Vasquez, among others, thereby joining the 12 inaugural awardees of 2021, including Annie Ernaux, David Grossman, Amin Maalouf and Olga Tokarczuk. The RSL international Writers program is an award recognizing the contribution of writers across the globe, celebrating the power of literature to transcend boundaries. New writers are invited to join the program each year.

Yazbek has published two collections of short stories, seven novels, four non-fiction literary narratives. Samar Yazbek lives in France. Her books have been translated in over twenty languages.

About the translator:
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has twice been a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in 2021 for her translations of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

TMR 42 • THEATRE Roundtable Discussion
2024-06-20 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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This month, TMR presents a lively and potentially contentious conversation on contemporary Arab and Arab American theatre from the viewpoint of its theatremakers in the post-Covid era. This discussion will be moderated by playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak (Iraq), and featuring artistic director/producer Georgina Van Welie (UK/Kuwait), Egyptian American playwright Yussef El Guindi (USA) and Syrian playwright Mudar Alhaggi.
Join us online on Thursday, June 20th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET/ 6pm UK.
Discover their work in our THEATRE issue:

Hassan Abdulrazzak’s centerpiece: Dare Not Speak—a One-Act Play
Yussef El Guindi’s play: As We Near the End (or What Adorno Said)
Georgina Van Welie’s essay: Arab Shakespeare?
Mudar Alhaggi’s play: The Return of Danton—a Play by Mudar Alhaggi & Collective Ma’louba

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About the speakers:
Hassan Abdulrazzak is an award-winning writer of Iraqi origin, born in Prague and living in London. His plays include The Special Relationship; And Here I Am; Love, Bombs and Apples; The Prophet; and Baghdad Wedding (all published by Bloomsbury). Abdulrazzak has translated numerous Arabic plays and contributed to several anthologies including Iraq +100 (Comma Press). The script of his short film A Night of Gharam won the Unsolicited Scripts Short Film Grant 2022.
Born in Egypt, raised in London and now based in Seattle, Yussef El Guindi’s work frequently examines the collision of ethnicities, cultures and politics that face Arab/ Middle Eastern Americans and Muslim Americans. His many productions include Hotter Than Egypt at Marin Theatre Company and ACT in Seattle; People of the Book at ACT; The Talented Ones at ART in Portland; and Threesome at Portland Center Stage, ACT, and at 59E59 (NY). Broadway Play Publishing Inc. published a collection of short pieces entitled In A Clear Concise Arabic Tongue. He is the recipient of several honors, including the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, American Blues Theater’s Blue Ink Playwriting Award, L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award, and the Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award.
Georgina Van Welie graduated from Cambridge University then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she directed three shows for their Fringe Festival before going on to found her own company Inigo Productions. Co-founder of Sabab Theatre from 2002 – 2013 she produced bilingual Arabic/English theatre productions in collaboration with prestigious performing-arts organisations that include: The Kennedy Center, BAM New York, Arts Emerson (USA); The Royal Shakespeare Company, Riverside Studios, Gate Theatre, Shubbak Festival (UK); Le Comedie Francaise, Bouffes du Nord (France), The Holland Festival, Warsaw Festival, Attiki Festival Greece; The Tokyo International Arts Festival, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Singapore Arts Festival, Sydney Festival; Dar al Athar Al Islamiyyah Kuwait, Al Ain Festival, Sharjah Biennale, Cairo International Theatre Festival, Le Tournesol Theatre Beirut. She is currently working on a new Shakespeare Trilogy. Georgina has also worked as story liner, script editor and co-writer on a number of award-winning TV shows and films with Channel 4, Pearson Television (UK) and most recently with Linked Productions Whose Country (dir. Siam Mohammed).
Mudar Alhaggi is a playwright, dramaturg, and cultural activist. He received a B.A in Dramatic Studies from The Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in 2005 and shortly afterwards co-established the Street Workshop for playwriting. From 2005-2011, he designed interactive activities for children, and trained trainers in interactive theatre methods. He participated in several writing workshops and residency programs in Europe and the Arab region.
He was artist in residency in “Delfina foundation , London 2010” and in “Schlachthaus Theater Bern, 2014.” In 2013, Mudar moved from Damascus to Beirut, where did many artistic projects, he launched “KEIT KEIT KEIT” a series of writing and documentation workshops for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Then later in Europe ( Graz, Zurich, Dresden, Berlin), he also was a dramaturge of ( above zero) performance, produced by Koon theatre group, and presented in Beirut, Tunisa, and Amsterdam. Also in 2014 Mudar directed (one thousand and one tents) performance, produced by Ettijahat, and presented in sunflower theatre in Beirut. In May-june Mudar was artist in residency in “Schlachthaus Theater Bern” where he wrote a daily blog for -Auawirleben theatre festival, and started a collaporation with K.N.P.V teater group, in producing (41 stunden) where was a drmaturg/ performer, the show was premiered in 2016 in Kellertheatre wintertur. In 2014- 2015 Founder and artistic director (with Erik Altorfer) of Futures Stages, a playwriting workshop for Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The project was supported by Ettijahat and prohelvitia.
His texts incude The Don Juan, Wisal, Bronze, When Farah Cries, 41 Hours, Your Love is Fire, Barsach, Orura, Just a Formality, The Dead are Busy, The Return of Danton.
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Literary Event: "Stories from the Center of the World" with editor Jordan Elgrably
2024-06-29 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Gazette Café, 6 Rue Levat, Montpellier, 34000, France
TMR presents a literary event in English, for the release of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction published by City Lights, with editor Jordan Elgrably on Saturday, June 29th at 7pm at Gazette Café in Montpellier.
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About the book:
This book brings together the best short stories published in The Markaz Review literary magazine, with contributions from 25 emerging and/or established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origin; a unique collection of voices and points of view that illuminate life in the modern Arab world.
The stories cover a number of styles and genres, from literary fiction to science fiction, epistolary to noir.
Contributors include Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed, Omar El Akkad, Sarah AlKahly-Mills, Nektaria Anastasiadou, Amany Kamal Eldin, Jordan Elgrably, May Haddad, Malu Halasa, Mohamad Khalil (MK) Harb, Alireza Iranmehr, Karim Kattan, Hanif Kureshi, Sahar Mustafah, Ahmed Naji, Mai Al-Nakib and Natasha Tynes.
About the editor:
Jordan Elgrably is a Moroccan-born Franco-American writer whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. He is the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markaz Review in Montpellier.
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The Muslim Musical Mosaic Project: Creating A New American Muslim Musical Tradition
2024-06-30 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Denver) | Cats Crawl Theater, 660 North Heliotrope Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90004, United States
The Markaz Review is proud to co-sponsor Muslims for Progressive Value’s event: “Creating a New American Muslim Tradition” as part of Phase I of their Muslim Musical Mosaic.
This event will take place at the Cats Crawl Theater in Los Angeles, CA (660 North Heliotrope Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90004) on June 30, 2024 from 5:00-6:30 pm PST. Featured speakers and performers include: Professor Mark Levine (University California-Irvine), Lu Fuki, Alfred Madian, Farah Mitha, Tazeen Ayub, Aiman Khan and Ani Zonneveld.
To learn more and register: https://mpvusa.networkforgood.com/events/71316-muslim-musical-mosaic-event

TMR Book Club Discusses "On the Isle of Antioch" by Amin Maalouf
2024-06-30 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Join us online on Sunday, June 30th at 1 pm Eastern/19:00 CET for this month’s Book Club discussion of On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated by Natasha Lehrer.
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About the book:
In this dystopian novel about total collapse by internationally renowned author Amin Maalouf, a complete blackout hits a small island with only two solitary inhabitants, who suddenly have to depend on each other.
Alec, a press artist with an impressive track record, settles on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. He has little contact with his neighbor, a solitary woman who wrote a cult book years ago, before withdrawing from public life. That is, until a gigantic power failure cuts them off from the rest of the world, and all of a sudden they find themselves dependent on each other. The world appears to be on the brink of nuclear war and the collapse of civilization seems imminent. Just who are the mysterious friends of Empedocles, the gang of otherworldly protectors who came swooping in to interfere with the US presidency and cure all illness? Should we trust them? On the Isle of Antioch is a suspenseful novel with mythological roots, written in the dreamy language of the classics, by internationally renowned scholar Amin Maalouf.
Published by World Editions.
About the author:
AMIN MAALOUF was born in Beirut and lived there until the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975. He settled in Paris in 1976 and published his first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, in 1983. In 1993, The Rock of Tanios, his fifth novel, won the Goncourt Prize, the most prestigious literary award in France. Maalouf is a member of the Académie Française and in 2010 was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature for his entire oeuvre. In 2021 he was voted one of 12 International Writers by the Royal Society of Literature, an initiative celebrating the power of literature to transcend borders and bring people together. He was awarded both the Terzani Prize and the Malaparte Prize for Adrift, also published in English by World Editions. His work has been translated into 50 languages and his most recent bestselling novel available in English is The Disoriented.
About the translator:
NATASHA LEHRER is a prizewinning writer, translator, and editor. Her long-form journalism and book reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, Haaretz, and Fantastic Man, among others, and she is literary editor of the Jewish Quarterly. She has contributed to several books, including a chapter on France in Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism, edited by Jo Glanville. The writers she has translated include Nathalie Léger, Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille.
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Weaving a World: Arabic Poetry in Translation
2024-07-13 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Denver) | Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA, 90291, United States
The Markaz Review and Beyond Baroque are pleased to present “Weaving a World: Arabic Poetry in Translation.” Titled after the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al -Raddi’s poem, “Weaving a World,” the evening of readings in The Wanda Coleman Theatre at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA features poets Zeina Hashem Beck, Zêdan Xelef, and Maya Salameh. This event is part of the Poetry Coalition’s slate of programs in the spring and summer that reflect the transformative impact poetry has on individual readers and communities across the nation, and is made possible (in part) by the Academy of American Poets with support from the Mellon Foundation.

This event will take place in-person at Beyond Baroque (681 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291) and live on YouTube on Saturday, July 13th at 7:00 pm PT.

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TMR Book Club Discusses "The Oud Player of Cairo" with author Jasmin Attia
2024-07-28 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
Join us for our July Book Club discussion of “The Oud Player of Cairo” with author Jasmin Attia on Sunday, July 28th at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET on Zoom.
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Vibrantly descriptive and evocative of the waning colonial world in Egypt during the mid-20th century, this debut historical novel by Jasmin Attia is the compelling story of a young Egyptian woman, Laila, who defies the restrictive traditional roles set for women of that time, and instead follows the path inspired by her musician father, a much-beloved oud player, to become a singer and performer In her own right.
After extricating herself from an abusive marriage, Laila struggles to maintain her independence as a singer in Cairo’s chic international nightclubs, and embarks on an affair that puts her in grave danger, forcing her to make a decision that will forever alter the course of her life.
Published by Schaffner Press, 360 pages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jasmin Attia is a 2021 graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College, and 2022 winner of the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and served as a mentor for the Cream Literary Alliance in West Palm Beach. Her writing appears in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, the Jewish Book Council’s’ Paper Brigade, and The Millions.
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FROM ARABIC to ENGLISH: The Challenges & Rewards of Literary Translation
2024-08-01 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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English has become the world’s lingua franca — and one of the largest languages for literary work from the Middle East and beyond. Fresh from publishing our double summer fiction issue, The Markaz Review presents five seasoned translators who work to find the best English version of original writing in Arabic: Lina Mounzer, Chip Rossetti, Nada Faris, Zia Ahmed & Rana Asfour.
Join us for this roundtable discussion moderated by Lina Mounzer on Thursday, August 1st 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 on the art of translation, with all its challenges and rewards. This roundtable is supported by grants from Hawthornden and Open Society Foundations.
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About the speakers:
Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is a senior editor at The Markaz Review.
Read her translation of Tarek Abi Samra’s essay, “Flaubert’s Poison Pen” from the Arabic in our latest issue.

Chip Rossetti’s published translations include the novel Beirut, Beirut by Sonallah Ibrahim; the short story collection Animals in Our Days by Mohamed Makhzangi; Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik; and No Windmills in Basra, by Diaa Jubaili. His translations have also appeared in Asymptote, The White Review, Banipal, and Words without Borders. He has a Ph.D. in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and has worked in book publishing for over 20 years. He is currently the Editorial Director for the Library of Arabic Literature series published by New York University Press.
Read his translation of Diaa Jubaili’s flash fiction, “The Doll with the Purple Scarf” in our latest issue.

Nada Faris is a writer and literary translator. In 2018, she received an Arab Woman Award from Harper’s Bazaar Arabia for her impact on creatives in Kuwait. She is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at Iowa University’s International Writing Program (IWP) Fall 2013; and an alumna of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) 2018: Empowering Youth through the Performing Arts. Faris holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry & Literary Translation) from Columbia University. She is the author of multiple books in different genres. Her shorter works have appeared in: The Norton Anthology for Hint Fiction, Gulf Coast Journal, Indianapolis Review, Nimrod, Tribes, One Jacar, The American Journal of Poetry, and more. Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa (DarArab, 2024) is Faris’ first literary translation.
Read her translation of Nora Nagi’s short story, “Certainty” in our latest issue.

Zia Ahmed is an American writer and translator from Virginia. He lived in Muscat, Oman, for three years. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Asymptote Journal, Sard Adabi and Nizwa, Oman’s premier literary magazine. A translation of his Arabic short story “La Takhif” [“Be Not Afraid”] will appear in an upcoming issue of the Denver Quarterly.
Read his translation of Hamoud Saud’s short story, “A Blind Window on Childhood” from the Arabic in our latest issue.

Rana Asfour is the Managing Editor at The Markaz Review, as well as a freelance writer, book critic and translator. Her work has appeared in such publications as Madame Magazine, The Guardian UK and The National/UAE. She chairs the TMR English-language BookGroup, which meets online the last Sunday of every month. She tweets @bookfabulous.
Read her translation of an excerpt from Mohammad Alnaas’s novel “Altercation in Jahannam” in our latest issue.
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WRITING ACROSS BOUNDARIES: Queerness, Multilingualism, and Generational Clashes in Fiction
2024-08-14 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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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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Rencontre Littéraires et Poétiques : Coline Houssais, Karim Kattan et Rachida Belkacem
2024-09-21 15:00 - 2024-09-22 15:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Domaine D’O, 178, rue de la Carriérasse, Montpellier, 34090, France
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The Markaz Review fait sa rentrée littéraire au Festival Arabesques. Venez découvrir nos deux évènements littéraires et poétiques au Domaine D’O à Montpellier.

Coline Houssais présentera son livre Paris en lettres arabes (Actes Sud 2024), qui jette des ponts entre la culture parisienne et divers écrivains arabes au fil du temps. Le samedi 21 septembre à 15h au Domaine d’O, entrée gratuite.

Coline Houssais est spécialiste des cultures du monde arabe. Formée à l’Institut d’études arabes de Damas et au campus Moyen-Orient-Méditerranée de Sciences Po, où elle enseigne aujourd’hui, elle est également traductrice, journaliste et chercheuse indépendante. La conversation sera animée par Sarah Naili de The Markaz Review.

L’écrivain palestinien Karim Kattan et la poétesse franco-marocaine Rachida Belkacem seront réunis pour une conversation littéraire le dimanche 22 septembre 2024 à 15h au Domaine d’O, entrée gratuite.

Karim Kattan présentera son nouveau roman paru aux éditions Elyzad, L’Éden à l’aube, autour de l’histoire d’amour d’Isaac et Gabriel, à Jérusalem, où il est question de djinns et de checkpoints, au cœur de la Palestine.
Karim Kattan est un écrivain palestinien de Bethléem. Il est docteur en littérature comparée. Il écrit en anglais et en français. Ses textes — fictions, essais, et poèmes — sont à la convergence des littératures de l’imaginaire et des littératures expérimentales.
Rachida Belkacem présentera son dernier recueil de poésie, L’Odyssée des possibles.
Ancienne chroniqueuse radio et membre de jurys de prix littéraires, Rachida Belkacem est très impliquée dans la vie culturelle française et marocaine. En 2023, elle publie un recueil de poésie intitulé Phronésis (Mindset Éditions), un ouvrage en prose sur la lumière, la liberté et l’optimisme. Dans l’ouvrage collectif Maroc de quoi avons-nous peur, sorti en 2020, elle analyse la condition des femmes marocaines : « L’évolution de la condition féminine, pour qu’elle s’inscrive dans les mœurs et les mentalités, ne peut être que le fruit d’une action inclusive impliquant les hommes. »
La conversation sera animée par Jordan Elgrably, rédacteur en chef de The Markaz Review.
Pour en savoir plus : www.festivalarabesques.fr

GATEKEEPERS: Arab Writers, Editors & Publishers Confront Mainstream Opposition
2024-09-26 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Zoom, United States
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The Markaz Review presents GATEKEEPERS: Arab Writers, Editors & Publishers Confront Mainstream Opposition, a roundtable with Palestinian authors/publishers/editors Michel Moushabeck and Hannah Moushabeck, and author/publisher/editor Ammiel Alcalay. Free speech and the freedom to publish inconvenient truths during the war on Gaza; what hoops and misconceptions do writers and publishers from the region face; and who gatekeepers in popular Western publishing are some of the topics for the panel, which will be moderated by TMR editors Jordan Elgrably & Malu Halasa.
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About the speakers:

Michel Moushabeck is the founder of the independently owned Interlink Books (1987), which has an active list of over 1,000 titles and has published more Arab authors than any other US publisher. He is also a writer, editor, and musician of Palestinian Arab descent. In April this year he received the Arab American of the Year Award from ACCESS in Detroit. Moushabeck lectures frequently on Arabic music and literature in translation. He plays music almost daily; is an avid hiker and mountain climber; and is a rather obsessive collector of jazz and world music, world percussion instruments, books, old maps, and contemporary art.

Hannah Moushabeck is a second-generation Palestinian American author and book worker who was raised in a family of publishers and booksellers and learned the power of literature at a young age. Hannah has worked in publishing for over a decade at companies such as Chronicle Books, The Quarto Group, and Simon & Schuster. She now runs Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States, alongside her family. Her debut picture book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine (Chronicle Books) won The New England Book Award and The Arab American Book Award. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts on the homelands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc Nations.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar. Among his more than 20 books are After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture; Memories of Our Future; a little history; and the forthcoming Follow the Person: Archival Encounters, as well as CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books. His co-translation of Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, is due out in early 2025. He received an American Book Award in for his work as founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and is a Distinguished Professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Read his essay in our latest issue: My Life Among the Gatekeepers

Moderators

Jordan Elgrably is an American, French and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and the Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001–2020). He is the editor of Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights, 2024), and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumūd: a New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories, 2024), Based in Montpellier, France and California, he tweets @JordanElgrably.
Read the editorial in our latest issue: Why GATEKEEPERS?
Malu Halasa, literary editor at The Markaz Review, is a London-based writer and editor. Her latest book as editor is Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art From the Women’s Protests in Iran (Saqi 2023). Her six previous co-edited anthologies include Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, with coedited with Zaher Omareen & Nawara Mahfoud; The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, with Rana Salam; and the short series: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images, with Rosanne Khalaf, and Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar Bahari. She was managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library; a founding editor of Tank Magazine and Editor at Large for Portal 9. As a freelance journalist in London, she has covered wide-ranging subjects, from water as occupation in Israel/Palestine to Syrian comics during the present-day conflict. Her books, exhibitions and lectures chart a changing Middle East. Malu Halasa’s 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.” She tweets at @halasamalu.
Read her essay in our latest issue: Featured Artists—”Barred From Home”
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TMR Book Club on Stories from the Center of the World readings & conversation
2024-09-29 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
The Markaz Book Club invites you to readings and conversation about Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction, edited by Jordan Elgrably and published in May by City Lights in San Francisco. Participating are editors Jordan Elgrably and Malu Halasa, along with writers Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed and Tariq Mehmood, who will read from their short stories, and discuss the state of short fiction out of the region TMR calls “the center of the world,” from Pakistan in the east to Morocco in the west.

Join us for this roundtable discussion on Sunday, September 29th at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET on Zoom.

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About the speakers:

Leila Aboulela is author of the story “Raise Your Head High.”Her most recent novel is River Spirit, published by Saqi Books. Her short story collection Elsewhere, Home, won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Scotland where she now lives.

Farah Ahamed wrote the story “Anarkali, or Six Early Deaths in Lahore.” Her writing has been published in Ploughshares, White Review, LA Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today and The Markaz Review, among others. She lives in London.

Jordan Elgrably is the founder of The Markaz Review, author of the story “The Afghan and the Persian,” and editor of the anthology Stories from the Center of the World published by City Lights.

Malu Halasa is literary editor at The Markaz review and the author of the short story “A Dog in the Woods” in the same anthology.

Tariq Mehmood is the writer of the story “The Settlement,” as well as a novelist and filmmaker. Among his works are the novel Hand On The Sun, on the experience of racism by young migrants to the UK, and While There Is Light, a novel backdropped by the case of the BRADFORD 12. He lives and teaches in Beirut.

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This program is online and free to the public. Don’t miss what promises to be a rich conversation about short stories and TMR’s first fiction anthology. This roundtable is supported by grants from Hawthornden and Open Society Foundations.

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8e Biennale /si:n/ س Marseille
2024-10-20 08:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Friche Belle de Mai, 41 Rue Jobin, Marseille, 13003, France
La biennale ouvrira le 20 octobre à Marseille à la Friche la Belle de Mai, avec 4 programmations d’art vidéo palestinien et international, une installation vidéo et une table ronde en partenariat avec The Markaz Review.
/si:n/, la lettre mathématique qui représente l’inconnu, le “x” en français et en anglais. Le spectateur la voit comme une lettre arabe mais phonétiquement, elle recouvre d’autres sens en langue anglaise : Scene (la scène) et Seen (to see : voir). L’intitulé /si:n/ exprime donc à lui seul la volonté du festival à être un espace de rencontres entre des cultures.
Inspiré.e.s * par les mouvements de solidarité tricontinentaux et anti-impérialistes des années 1960 à 80, à la croisée des pratiques militantes, artistiques et muséologiques qui ont crée une forme très particulière de musée de solidarité, sans murs, et le plus souvent, des musées en exil (en soutien aux peuple du Chili, du Nicaragua, de l’Afrique du Sud et bien sur de la Palestine), la Fondation A.M. Qattan et les Instants Vidéo ont ainsi lancé un appel à solidarité.
(*Voir l’exposition Passé Inquiet, curatée par Kristine Khouri & Rash Salti)

Table ronde EN QUÊTE D’IMAGE(S)
2024-10-20 17:30 - 19:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Friche Belle de Mai, 41 Rue Jobin, Marseille, 13003, France
La 8e biennale d’art vidéo et de performance de Palestine /si:n/, co-fondée avec la Fondation A.M. Qattan, est contrainte à l’exil et est accueillie par le 37e Festival Les Instants Vidéo à Marseille, le 20 octobre 2024. Sous le titre Éloge de l’ombre haute, elle présentera durant toute la journée quatre programmations d’art vidéo d’une trentaine d’artistes, dont deux provenant de Palestine et deux internationales, en réponse à un appel à solidarité.
La table ronde EN QUÊTE D’IMAGE(S) se tiendra à 17h45, centrée sur la création artistique la discussion explorera le geste artistique et ce que signifie être artiste, en mettant l’accent sur le travail de plusieurs artistes palestinien.ne.s.
La journaliste Lyana Saleh animera la table ronde avec comme invité.e.s :

Mohamed Abusal : Artiste multidisciplinaire de Gaza, tout juste arrivé en France.
Marion Slitine : Anthropologue et chercheuse, spécialisée dans les interactions entre art, politique et espace public en Palestine.
Mahmoud Al-Haj : Artiste visuel et enseignant
Ashtar Muallem : Artiste interdisciplinaire
Sireen El Araj : Graphiste et chercheuse
Manel Mahamid: Artiste pluridisciplinaire, elle présentera sa vidéo From Akka to Gaza.
Charlotte Schwarzinger: Doctorante EHESS associée IFPO

La biennale continuera à voyager à travers le monde jusqu’en 2025, avec des étapes prévues en Éthiopie, aux États-Unis, en Belgique, en Jordanie et en Italie…
Retrouvez l’ensemble du programme de la journée ici: https://www.instantsvideo.com/blog/2024/09/8e-biennale-sin/
Une production des Instants Vidéo et de la Fondation A.AM Qattan
Les partenaires: REF, Ma’an For Gaza Artist, The Markaz Review

Roundtable Discussion - A Year of War: A Conversation on Our Shared Future
2024-10-24 19:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Zoom, United States
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The Markaz Review invites you to attend A YEAR OF WAR, A CONVERSATION ON OUR SHARED FUTURE: a roundtable with Samina Najmi, Ziad Suidan and Lina Mounzer, with special guest Mona Seif.
Following the publication of our October 2024 issue, FROM HERE, ONE YEAR ON, we invite you to participate in a discussion about the year of war that began on October 7, 2023, which has since spread into Lebanon and Yemen, with further hostilities expected between Israel and Iran. Israel has refused ceasefire proposals from the UN and the White House, and continues to bomb Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. At the same time, many of the region’s inhabitants are living under despotic regimes, where freedom of expression is a daily danger, where dissidents are thrown into prison, women’s rights are curtailed, and religious minorities experience oppression or exile.
Samina Najmi, Ziad Suidan and Lina Mounzer will talk about their essays in FROM HERE, ONE YEAR ON, while Mona Seif will discuss discuss the continued imprisonment in Cairo of her brother Alaa Abd El-Fattah despite finishing his five year sentence (Alaa Abd El-Fattah is sharing the 2024 English PEN Pinter Prize with Arundati Roy, it was just announced.)
In this time of heightened tensions, genocide and war, with the entire Middle East region on edge, Nobel Prize Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi is calling for peace from her Evin Prison cell in Tehran, while millions march for peace in Palestine and Lebanon. Join us on October 24 for what is certain to be a passionate conversation, moderated by Lina Mounzer, senior editor at The Markaz Review.
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About the speakers:
Mona Seif grew up in a family of Egyptian activists. Her father Ahmed Seif was a human rights attorney and her brother Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a human rights activist and author. Mona is known for her participation in dissident movements during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, for her creative use of social media in campaigns, and for her work to end military trials for civilian protesters. She is a biology graduate student in the UK, investigating the BRCA1 breast cancer gene.

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literatures at California State University, Fresno. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in World Literature Today, The Rumpus, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her collection of essays, Sing Me a Circle, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Award in creative nonfiction and will be published by Trio House Press in 2025. Samina grew up in Pakistan and England and raised her now-adult children in Fresno. Read her essay in our October issue: The Spark of Your Story, Ode to Aaron Bushnell.

Ziad Suidan is a lecturer at Haigazian University. He teaches English Literature, Cultural Studies and Communication Arts. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature in 2013 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation focused on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and its poetics of exile.
Read his centerpiece essay in our latest issue: Witnessing Catastrophe: a Painter in Lebanon.

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TMR Book Club Discusses "The Jinn Daughter" with author Rania Hanna
2024-10-27 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Halifax) | Zoom, United States
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Join us on Sunday, October 27th at 1pm EST to discuss “The Jinn Daughter” with author Rania Hanna.
Rooted in Middle Eastern mythology, Rania Hanna deftly weaves subtle, yet breathtaking, magic through this vivid and compelling story that has at its heart the universal human desire to, somehow, outmaneuver death.
Published by AUC Press (Hoopoe), 274 pages.
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About the author:
Rania Hanna is a Syrian–American writer and researcher. She is a neuroscience doctoral student at George Mason University. “The Jinn Daughter” is her debut novel.
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Roundtable Discussion: Day of the Imprisoned Writer
2024-11-13 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Writers in prison should have been a phrase entering extinction after the death of fascism at the end of World War II. Instead, there are more incarcerated writers in the world today than at perhaps anytime since WWII. From the famous cases of Alaa Abd El-Fattah in Egypt and Narges Mohammadi in Iran, to the little-known poets & writers in jail across the globe, PEN International marks November 15th each year as The Day of the Imprisoned Writer.
Join novelists Ahdaf Soueif and Maaza Mengiste with writers Mina Thabet from PEN International and Jordan Elgrably from The Markaz Review on Wednesday, November 13th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET, as we discuss what can be done to put an end to the incarceration of writers, and the persecution of freedom of expression.
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About the speakers:
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of – among other titles – the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into more than 30 languages), the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun (1993) and Cairo: a City Transformed, her account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. As a translator, her rendering of Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah has become a classic. As a political and cultural commentator, her Mezzaterra (2004) has been influential and her articles for the Guardian are published in the European and American press. From 2011 to 2015 she wrote a weekly column for the Egyptian national daily, al-Shorouk. In 2007 Ms Soueif founded the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest, which takes place in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. Ms Soueif has been awarded four honorary doctorates and was the first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwish Award (Palestine) in 2010. In 2019 she received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margaret Award. Twitter: @asoueif • FaceBook: Ahdaf Soueif.
Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books. Maaza has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, DAAD, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Fulbright Scholar Program.
Mina Thabet is a UK-based writer, researcher and human rights expert focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. He is the head of the MENA region for PEN International and has been covering issues of freedom of expression and the challenges writers face across the region. He has also worked with minority communities in the region to combat discrimination and violence against religious and ethnic minorities and promote diverse cultures, languages, and religious freedoms.
Jordan Elgrably is an American, French and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and the Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001–2020). He is the editor of Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights, 2024), and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumūd: a New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories, 2025), Based in Montpellier, France and California, he tweets @JordanElgrably.
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This online event is free to the public. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.

TMR Book Club Discusses "Selamlik" with author Khaled Alesmael
2024-11-24 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Online
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Join us for our final book club discussion of the year on Sunday, November 24th at 1pm EST/ 7pm CET as we dive into “Selamlik” with the author Khaled Alesmael.
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
An unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticism.
Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, one of the city’s most popular cruising areas. There he learns about the hammams, secret meeting places for gay men located throughout the old city. Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Furat faces sometimes violent disapproval from all levels of society, religion, and the man in the street–and yet he manages to find the love he’s been seeking just before his world collapses and he’s forced to flee.
Selamlik is the story of Furat’s journey, along with that of other refugees. It’s a journey in which they face physical and economic hardship, draconian migration laws, and the unwelcome grief, shame, and hatred they’ve carried with them from their ever more distant pasts. Despite everything, Furat remains steadfast in his pursuit of passion, pleasure, and love.
Published by World Editions, translated by Leri Price, 2024 (pages 240).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A Syrian-Swedish queer writer, journalist, and filmmaker based in London. His writing appears in several media outlets, including New Statesman in London and Taz in Berlin. He speaks about queer literature particularly Arabic and Syrian at public events and universities, including Oxford University, the University of Sussex, and the University of Essex.
His debut novel, Selamlik (2018), A queer Syrian refugee story informed by his personal life as a gay refugee in Europe after the civil war in Syria and the book has received notable acclaim and was shortlisted for the German SKOUTZ Award in 2021.
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Rencontre et Atelier : TRADUIRE LA LITTÉRATURE ARABE
2024-11-26 15:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Maison des relations internationales, Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle , Montpellier, 34000, France
ATELIER DÉCOUVERTE DE LA TRADUCTION ARABE VIA LA POÉSIE 15h00-16h30

Participez à un atelier de découverte de la langue arabe et de sa traduction. Comment aborder une nouvelle langue ? Animé par Lotfi Nia, cet atelier vous invite à un voyage collectif entre les langues pour explorer la traduction à travers un poème.
À la Boutique d’écriture & Co
76 Rue du Faubourg Figuerolles, Montpellier.
Gratuit sur inscription par email association@laboutiquedecriture.org ou par téléphone 04 67 02 17 41

RENCONTRE SUR LA TRADUCTION LITTÉRAIRE ARABE 18h00 – Entrée libre

Venez découvrir la nouvelle génération d’auteurs de fiction issue du monde arabe et explorer le rôle essentiel du traducteur. Ce dernier est-il un passeur, un découvreur d’autres littératures et cultures ? Lotfi Nia nous plongera dans les coulisses du métier, en nous présentant ses récentes traductions d’auteurs contemporains parues en français.
Lotfi Nia est traducteur de l’arabe vers le français, il a collaboré avec des maisons d’édition françaises et algériennes sur des œuvres contemporaines d’Algérie, de Tunisie, du Liban et de Palestine. Il a traduit les œuvres de Samir Kacimi, Aymen Daboussi, Salah Badis ou encore Amara Lakhous. Il anime des ateliers d’expression littéraire, y compris en prison, et organise des ateliers de traduction multilingues pour les nouveaux arrivants en France, en mettant l’accent sur l’enregistrement et la transcription des performances orales. Membre du Collectif Delta (Défricheurs-Explorateurs de Littératures à Traduire Absolument) et animateur de la BaaM à Marseille (Bibliothèque arabe associée de Marseille), il enseigne également la traduction et travaille comme interprète dans le domaine de la santé.
À La Maison des Relations Internationales
Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, Montpellier
Ces rencontres sont organisées dans le cadre de Territoires du Livre, une opération financée par la Sofia, avec le soutien de la Fill et de l’ATLF.
En partenariat avec la Librairie Géosphère.

Festival ADAB 2024 Paris
2024-12-06 18:00 - 2024-12-07 21:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Maison de la poésie, Passage Molière, 157 rue Saint-Martin, Paris, 75003, France
Adab signifie littérature en arabe et s’écrit ادب. Les mots turc (edebiyat) et persan (adabiyat) pour dire littérature sont des dérivés d’adab, symbole de la porosité des langues et des mots voyageurs, du Maghreb au Moyen-Orient.

Adab est un festival littéraire dédié aux nouvelles écritures venues du Maghreb et du Moyen-Orient et à la nouvelle génération d’écrivain-e-s de la région, tout en rendant hommage aux grandes plumes des dernières décennies. Depuis 2011, le monde arabe et le Moyen-Orient ont connu d’intenses bouleversements sociaux et politiques, qui se sont exprimés à travers une production culturelle renouvelée dans les pays de la région mais également dans les diasporas d’Europe. Ce sont ces nouvelles voix que nous vous donnerons à entendre durant deux jours à la Maison de la Poésie.
Pour cette deuxième édition, le public découvrira une série de rencontres différentes, tantôt individuelles avec des auteurs, tantôt sous forme de dialogue entre écrivains explorant des thèmes socio-politiques contemporains. Par ailleurs, le festival célèbrera la pluralité des genres littéraires, mettant en lumière le roman et la bande dessinée, mais aussi l’essai et d’autres formes d’écriture académique. Les moments dédiés à la littérature seront enrichis par des ateliers d’écriture adaptés à différents publics, jeunes et adultes.
