A new Middle East is visible through the debris, but not the one dearly wanted by the United States and Israel.
26 JUNE 2026 • By Amal Ghandour
The 61st Venice Biennale is one of many cultural institutions beginning to crack under the weight of their own hypocrisy over the Gaza genocide.
26 JUNE 2026 • By Selma Dabbagh
An exploration of how an Ottoman slave became the mother of a library on a Greek island — and what her descendants did with it.
26 JUNE 2026 • By Jacob Wirtschafter
A dystopian satire grounded in the refugee crisis, austerity, bureaucratic collapse, and the slow destruction of a Greek island.
19 JUNE 2026 • By Ersi Sotiropoulos
A writer returns to her homeland — Lebanon — after years abroad, tracing the fault lines between memory and ruin.
19 JUNE 2026 • By Lara Atallah
This haunting tale explores the Mediterranean as an artistic inspiration, a deceptively hopeful bridge, and a vast cemetery.
19 JUNE 2026 • By Zeinab Ghassan Khaddour
The Mediterranean, generative yet unstable, is a site of passage and border, a space of paradise and ruin.
By Saleem Haddad
A daughter recalls her father’s near-loss in a river, following the water outward into what the Mediterranean remembers.
By Gabriela Mitrushi
Dhifi, an artist who embraces imperfection and chance, talks about his latest concept, an inverted Mediterranean.
By Naima Morelli
A Palestinian writer dissects the exquisite loneliness of losing one's mother tongue.
6 MARCH 2026 • By Majd Aburrub
A simple debate over a spoon opens a space in which a group of Syrian migrants reclaim an identity on the brink of erasure.
6 MARCH 2026 • By Zeinab Ghassan Khaddour
The civilizational supremacy of the West is under threat, insisted U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a speech in Munich.
3 APRIL 2026 • By Ayça Çubukçu
A writer imagines Iran one year in the future, after the bombs have stopped falling, and the resulting political and social landscape.
3 APRIL 2026 • By Shahram Khosravi
Three new pieces of SWANA literature, criticism and art every Friday-direct.
