Elias Khoury – författare

Meelya's dreams are her refuge from events that threaten her or escape her understanding. She leaves her home in Lebanon to live in Nazareth with her Palestinian husband, but Mansour - an older man who fell for her beauty - is frustrated by her spiritual absence. When Mansour's brother's death demands a move to Jaffa - the centre of early tensions between Jewish settlers and displaced Palestinians - Meelya withdraws further into the realm of dreams. Expecting the birth of their son, Mansour can only watch as she cuts loose from the physical world. Over three traumatic nights, past, present and future merge seamlessly into a series of visions that draw the reader towards a conclusion that is powerfully symbolic of the ongoing troubles in the Middle East.

"Khoury is one of the greatest writers of our times and perhaps the greatest Arabic-language writer of this generation, definite Nobel Prize material" Avraham Burg, HaaretzWho is Adam Dannoun?Until a few months before his death in a fire in his New York apartment - a consequence of smoking in bed - he thought he knew.But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changed all that. From Mahmoud he learned the terrible truth behind his birth, a truth withheld from him for fifty-seven years by the woman he thought was his mother.This discovery leads Adam to investigate what exactly happened in 1948 in Palestine in the city of Lydda where he was born: the massacre, the forced march into the wilderness and the corralling of those citizens who did not flee into what the Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian captives came to refer to as the Ghetto.The stories he collects speak of bravery, ingenuity and resolve in the face of unimaginable hardship. Saved from the flames that claimed him, they are his lasting and crucial testament.Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Why did he return to Beirut? Why did Karim leave his wife and children and the life he had built in France to return to a homeland still reeling from civil war? Was it to answer his brother Nasim's call to raise a hospital out of the ashes? Was it to kick over the traces of past love affairs? Or to establish the truth behind his father's death?Or was it to confront at last the ghost of the man known only as "Sinalcol", a legendary phantom of the civil war, and a broken mirror of himself? In Beirut, Karim will learn the fate of old comrades, and face a brother who shares a past as divided as the city itself. And he will find that peace is only ever fleeting in a war without end.

Yalo was a soldier on one of the many sides in Lebanon's sectarian civil war, before becoming a deserter and a thief, a nightwatchman in Paris, an arms smuggler, and then a rapist. And then he falls in love with his victim - who turns him in to the police. This novel is a modern Thousand and One Nights, a series of confessions extracted under torture, a recitation of all of his memories, all his sorrows, all his guilt - and of the other crimes his interrogators have him confess to. Beirut and the legacy of the wars of the Middle East are the texture of Elias Khoury's extraordinary literary achievement.

Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist presents a major feature on the celebrated Lebanese and international author, with excerpts from his latest novel Stella Maris, the second in the Children of the Ghetto trilogy, and a chapter from his first novel (until now not translated), plus in-depth articles on the corpus of novels including translations of his works into Hebrew, and reviews of his early novels. • We bid Adieu to poet Amjad Nasser in Fakhri Saleh’s essay on his poetry collections. • We introduce two winners of the Moroccan Argana International Poetry Prize – Wadih Saadeh and Hawad. • Also featured are the six shortlisted novels of the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. • Plus works by two well-known Iraqi writers: Muhammad Khudayyir and Muhsin al-Musawi – and poems by three young poets from Lebanon, Palestine and Tunisia. MANY THANKS to all our contributors, authors, translators, and editors, who have been working from home under coronavirus restrictions.

Yalo är en fattig ung man från Beirut. Han förhörs av polisen för sina påstådda brott: våldtäkt, rån och bombattentat. Men vem är egentligen skyldig? Hans liv har präglats av inbördeskrigets våld och skräck. Kriget har format hans personlighet och attityd. Vilka är hans egna brott, vilka är krigets och vilka är historiens? Endast kärleken erbjuder en räddning. Yalo är förälskad i Shirin och kan inte förstå varför hon anklagar honom för våldtäkt. Förhörsledaren ber Yalo skriva ner sitt livs historia, och han försöker, igen och igen och igen. För varje gång förändras innebörden lite grand och nya fakta dyker upp. Vem är offer, vem är förövare? Varken för Yalo själv eller för läsaren är det lätt att avgöra eller enkelt att döma. Elias Khoury är författare, dramatiker och journalist från Libanon. På svenska finns sedan tidigare romanerna Solens port och Som om hon sover.

Bidayat är en tidskrift med bas i Beirut som startades 2012, inspirerad av de arabiska revolutionerna. Bidayat betyder begynnelser. Det här numret av Glänta är helt och hållet sammanställt av deras redaktion, översatt från arabiska.