Stories from the Middle East
Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist, specializing in treating victims of torture. A weekly columnist for Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper, she was named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker, and a Go ...continued
Yasser Abdel Hafez is a journalist and novelist, and currently works as an editor at the literary magazine Akhbar al-Adab. His first novel On the Occasion of Life was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fictio ...continued
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–90) is one of the most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction of the twentieth century. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Abdel Kouddous graduated from law school in 1942 but left his law practice to pursue ...continued
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid has combined critical and creative writing throughout his literary career. His novel The Other Place was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was published by AUC Press in 1997. He is a c ...continued
Born in 1977, Muhammad Abdelnabi is the author of two novels and four short-story collections. His The Ghost of Anton Chekov won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award for short-story collections ...continued
Hamdi Abu Golayyel, born in Fayoum, Egypt, in 1967, is a writer and a journalist. He is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including Thieves in Retirement and A Dog with No Tail, which was a ...continued
Maan Abu Taleb is the founding editor of Ma3azef, the Arab world’s leading online music magazine, and he holds a master’s degree in philosophy and contemporary critical theory. Born and raised in Amman, Jordan, he now li ...continued
Rasha Adly is an Egyptian writer, born in Cairo in 1972. She is a researcher and freelance lecturer in the history of art, and Cairo correspondent for the Emirates Culture magazine. She is the author of six novels, and The Girl ...continued
Bothayna Al-Essa is a bestselling and award-winning Kuwaiti author. She has published nine novels, as well as collections of essays, children’s books, and translati ...continued
Gamal al-Ghitani, born in 1945, is the author of Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004), The Mahfouz Dialogs (AUC Press, 2007), Pyramid Texts (AUC Press, 2007), and The Book of Epiphanies (AUC Press, 201 ...continued
Omaima Al-Khamis was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1966. A prolific writer, columnist, critic, social reformer, and women’s rights activist, she has published novels, short-story collections, opinion pieces, and children’s ...continued
Ibrahim al-Koni was born in the northwest of the Sahara Desert in Libya in 1948 and learned to read and write Arabic at the age of twelve. He has been hailed a magical realist, a Sufi fabulist, and a poetic novelist, and his more th ...continued
Rabai al-Madhoun is a Palestinian writer and journalist, born in al-Majdal, in southern Palestine, in 1945. His family went to Gaza during the Nakba in 1948 and he later studied at Cairo and Alexandria universities, before being exp ...continued
Muhsin al-Ramli is a novelist, poet, translator, and academic who writes in both Arabic and Spanish. He was born in Sudayra in northern Iraq in 1967 and went into exile in 1993 after the government’s persecution of his family, whi ...continued
Latifa al-Zayyat (1923–96) struggled all her life to uphold just causes—national integrity, the welfare of the poor, human rights, freedom of expression, and the rejection of all forms of imperialist hegemony. As a professor of ...continued
Ahmed Alaidy, born in 1974, has written satirical stories for young people and currently writes a political comic strip for an Egyptian weekly.
Nektaria Anastasiadou is the 2019 winner of the Zografeios Agon, a Greek-language literary award founded in 19th-century Constantinople. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including The Markaz Review and ...continued
Sinan Antoon is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator. He was born in Iraq, and moved to the US in 1991 after the Gulf War. He received his PhD from Harvard University and is currently associate professor of Arabic literat ...continued
Radwa Ashour, a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer and scholar, is the author of more than fifteen books of fiction, memoir, and criticism, including Granada (AUC Press, 2008) and Specters (AUC Press, 2010). She is a ...continued
Ibrahim Aslan (1937–2012) was born in Tanta in the Nile Delta. He published his first collection of short stories, Buhayrat al-misa’ (‘Evening Lake’), in 1971. The Heron, his first novel, was published in A ...continued
Aziz Mohammed is a Saudi literary author, born in Khobar City in 1987. His debut novel The Critical Case of a Man Called K was published in 2017 and was shortlisted in 2018 for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, kn ...continued
Salwa Bakr was born in Cairo in 1949. She is the author of seven volumes of short stories (including The Wiles of Men, AUC Press, 1997), seven novels, and a play. Her work has been translated into nine languages.
Hassan Daoud, born in Beirut in 1950, holds a master’s degree in Arabic literature and has taught creative writing at the Lebanese American University. He is the editorial director of al-Mudun news website and is on the editorial ...continued
Ashraf El-Ashmawi is an Egyptian author, judge, and legal scholar. He worked in the public prosecutor’s office for many years and served in the Egyptian court of appeals. He is a regular contributor to newspapers ...continued
Hamdy el-Gazzar was born in 1970 in Cairo and graduated in philosophy from Cairo University. Since 1990 he has published several short stories and articles in the Arabic press, as well as writing and directing three plays. His first ...continued
Nael Eltoukhy is an Egyptian writer and journalist, born in Kuwait in 1978. He graduated from the Hebrew Department in Ain Shams University, Cairo in 2000. His first collection of short stories was published in 2003, and he is the a ...continued
Born in the Gharbiya Governorate of Egypt in 1959, Adel Esmat graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1984. He lives in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, and works as a library specialist in the ...continued
Bestselling Egyptian author Ibrahim Essa is a renowned journalist, TV personality, and political commentator. He lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Award-winning Moroccan novelist and screenwriter Youssef Fadel was born in Casablanca in 1949. During Morocco’s ‘Years of Lead’ he was imprisoned in the notorious Moulay Cherif prison (1974–75). A Rare Blue ...continued
Ezzedine C. Fishere is an acclaimed Egyptian writer, academic, and diplomat. He has written numerous successful and bestselling novels and he also writes political articles for Arabic, English, and French news outlets. He currently ...continued
Huzama Habayeb is a Palestinian writer who was born and raised in Kuwait, where she started writing and publishing short stories, poetry, and journalistic pieces as a student. When the Gulf War erupted in 1990, she fled to Jordan an ...continued
Rana Haddad grew up in Lattakia in Syria, moved to the UK as a teenager, and read English Literature at Cambridge University. She has since worked as a journalist for the BBC, Channel 4, and other broadcasters, and has also publishe ...continued
Born in Meknes, Morocco, in 1958, Abdelilah Hamdouchi is one of the first writers of police fiction in Arabic and a prolific, award-winning screenwriter of police thrillers. Many of his novels, including the acclaimed The Final ...continued
Described by Tawfiq al-Hakim as ‘’the renovator and genius of the short story,’’ Yusuf Idris was one of the great figures of twentieth-century Arabic literature. He was born in 1927, graduated from medical college in 1951, a ...continued
Ruqaya Izzidien is an Iraqi-Welsh freelance journalist and writer currently based in Morocco. Since graduating from Durham University she has also lived and worked in Cairo and the Gaza Strip.
Donia Kamal is an Egyptian novelist and producer. Cigarette Number Seven is her second novel, and she has also produced more than fifty documentary films and numerous television shows for various Arab networks. She currentl ...continued
Adel Kamel (1916–2005) was an Egyptian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. He was a founding member of the informal “harafish” writers’ collective that included such eminent writers as Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz ...continued
Khaled Khalifa was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1964. A founding editor of the literary magazine Alif, he is the author of four novels, including In Praise of Hatred. He has also written numerous scripts for TV dramas and ...continued
Sahar Khalifeh, born in Nablus in 1941, is an acclaimed Palestinian author. She is hailed as a feminist writer and has written eleven novels, which have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and many other languages ...continued
Elizabeth Loudon is a former college lecturer and charity development consultant. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in English from Cambridge University, and has taught at Smith, Amherst, and Will ...continued
Khadija Marouazi is a professor of literature at Ibn Tofaïl University in Kenitra, Morocco, and a human rights activist. She is a member of the scientific committee for the Moroccan magazine Dafatir al-sijjin (Prisoner’s Not ...continued
Sherif Meleka was born in 1958 into a Coptic Christian family in Alexandria, Egypt. A trained medical doctor, he emigrated to the United States in 1984. He is the author of numerous novels, poetry and short story collections in Ara ...continued
Hassouna Mosbahi was born in Kairouan, Tunisia, in 1950. He received the National Novel Prize (Tunisia) in 1986 and the Tukan Prize (Munich) in 2000. A Tunisian Tale is his first novel to be published in English.
Ibrahim Nasrallah is considered one of the most influential voices of his generation. Raised in a refugee camp to Palestinian parents, he became a journalist before turning to creative writing. His work includes fourteen novels. He ...continued
Born in 1978, Mohammad Rabie is the author of three acclaimed novels. His first novel, Amber’s Planet, won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award in 2012. He lives in Cairo, Egypt. ...continued
Mekkawi Said was born in Cairo in 1955. His first collection of short stories appeared in 1981, and since then he has produced four more. His first novel won the Suad Sabbah Arab Creativity Prize in 1991. Cairo Swan Song, h ...continued
Khairy Shalaby (1938–2011) was born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt’s Nile Delta. He wrote seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. His novel The Lodging House was awarded the N ...continued
Ahmed Taibaoui is a professor at the Faculty of Economics, Business, and Management Sciences at the University of Bouira in Algeria. He was awarded the Tayeb Salih International Prize for Written Creativity (2014) for his novel ...continued
M.M. Tawfik was born in Cairo in 1956. He earned degrees in civil engineering (Cairo University), international law (University of Paris), and international relations (International Institute of Public Administration in Paris) and h ...continued
Denyse Woods, who sometimes writes as Denyse Devlin, is an Irish novelist based in Cork. Born in Boston and raised all over the place, her novels include the critically acclaimed Overnight to Innsbruck and the bestselling The Catalp ...continued
George Yarak is a Lebanese novelist and journalist, born in 1958.
He has worked as an editor and writer for several Lebanese newspapers, magazines and publishers, and his first novel, Night, was published in 2013. He ...continued
Hammour Ziada was born in Umm Durman, Sudan in 1977. He has worked as a civil society and human rights researcher, and is currently a journalist based in Cairo. He is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories.
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