The Markaz Review Workshop: Writing From the Center of the World
2025-05-31 10:30 - 17:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE, United Kingdom
Whether you’re a seasoned or emerging writer, join TMR’s daylong writing workshop that aims to inspire and empower writers to engage with the Middle East and the wider world through the lens of creative expression. During this event, you will also get a chance to meet TMR’s editorial team, including editor-in-chief Jordan Elgrably, managing editor Rana Asfour, and literary editor Malu Halasa. Learn about TMR’s mission to provide critical and creative perspectives on SWANA arts, and discover how TMR has become a platform for the voices of Gaza, queer fiction from the region, and literary work that challenges and reshapes perceptions of and in the region.
Event highlights include an introduction to The Markaz Review (10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.), a workshop on critical writing and reviewing (12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.), a workshop on fiction and literary nonfiction (3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.), and a workshop on translation and publishing (4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.). Although the event is free, booking is essential.
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TMR Book Club Discusses Bothayna Al-Essa's "The Book Censor's Library," translated by Sawad Hussain & Ranya Abdelrahman
2025-06-29 19:00 - 20:00 | Online
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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.
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TMR Book Club Discusses The Burning Heart of the World with author Nancy Kricorian
2025-07-27 19:00 - 20:00 | Online
On Sunday, July 27th TMR’s Book Club will meet to discuss The Burning Heart of the World with author Nancy Kricorian at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET. Hosted by TMR Managing Editor Rana Asfour.
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In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.
About the author:
Nancy Kricorian is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and All The Light There Was, focused on post-genocide Armenian diaspora life. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. She lives in New York City.
Published by Red Hen Press, 2025.

This online event is open and free to the public. Registration is required. Donations are welcome to support The Markaz Review.
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TMR Book Club Discusses Omar Khalifah's "Sand-Catcher" with special guests
2025-09-28 19:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Join us on Sunday, September 28th at 1pm EST/ 6pm UK/ 7pm CET to discuss Omar Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher with special guests!
About the book:
A sardonic, thrilling fable about collective memory and the many ways it can be saved or subverted. Omar Khalifa’s debut novel Sand-Catcher is at once a polyphonic satire and a tightly plotted tale of suspense. Walking the line between gallows humor, rage, and depthless heartbreak, it is a unique reflection of contemporary Palestinian identity in all its facets.
Four young, Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are tasked, on account of their heritage, with profiling one of the last living witnesses of the Nakba, the violent expulsion of native Palestinians by the nascent state of Israel in 1948. Confident that the old man will be all too happy to go on record, the reporters are nonplussed when they are repeatedly, and obscenely, rebuffed. This living witness to history, this secular saint, has no desire to be interviewed, no desire for his memories to be preserved, no desire to serve as an inspiration for the youth of tomorrow. What he wants is to be left alone.
As threats from the team’s editor-in-chief put more and more pressure on the journalists, they must decide just how far they’re willing to go to get the old man on the record. After all, what possible weight can one stubborn demand for privacy have when balanced against the imperative to bear witness?
Published by Coffee House Press, 2024.
About the author & translator:
Omar Khalifah (author) is a novelist and short story writer in Arabic. His book, Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary, was published in English by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. His collection Ka’annani Ana (As If I Were Myself) was published in Amman, Jordan in 2010, and his novel Qabid al-Raml (Sand-Catcher) was published in 2020. His articles have appeared in Middle East Critique and Journal of World Literature. A Fulbright scholar, Khalifah is assistant professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Barbara Romaine is an academic and literary translator. She has published translations of five novels, most recently Waiting for the Past (Syracuse University Press, 2022), by the Iraqi novelist Hadiya Hussein. She has held two NEA fellowships in translation, one of which was for her work on Radwa Ashour's Spectres (Interlink Books, 2011). Spectres went on to place second in the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal international translation competition. Romaine’s translations of essays, short stories, and classical poetry have appeared in a variety of literary periodicals.
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