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Tayeb Salih is internationally known for his classic novel Season of Migration to the North. With humour, wit and erudite poetic insights, Salih shows another side in this affectionate memoir of his exuberant and irrepressible friend Mansi Yousif Bastawrous, sometimes known as Michael Joseph and sometimes as Ahmed Mansi Yousif. Playing Hardy to Salih’s Laurel Mansi takes centre stage among memorable 20th-century arts and political figures, including Samuel Beckett, Margot Fonteyn, Omar Sharif, Arnold Toynbee, Richard Crossman and even the Queen, but always with Salih’s poet “Master” al-Mutanabbi ready with an adroit comment.

Mahmoud Shukair's first major publication in English translation enthralls, surprises and shocks as one of the world's most original of storytellers excels in exposing the surreal moments in the ordinary and the mundane, the limits of human frustration and patience, and the intricacies of tiny daily obsessive practices. Brimming with humour that ranges from the funny and the farcical, to satire and black comedy, with a painter's eye for colour and detail, Shukair's stories present a unique commentary on the power of the human spirit to see beyond the particular.The collection includes the author's two fascinating autobiographical commentaries "Hemingway in Jerusalem" and "My Journey in Writing".Here is the brilliantly observed clutter and comedy of everyday lives, the lives of ordinary people pushed up against an iron occupation and fighting for survival with all the comic and moving strategems of the human imagination. Shukair's gift for absurdist satire is never more telling than in the hilarious title story which turns and pulls the leg (or the moustache) of the occupation, in the classic tradition of Palestinian satire. — Judith KazantzisTranslated from the Arabic by Issa J. Boullata, Elizabeth Whitehouse, Liz Winslow and Mahmoud Shukair. Mahmoud Shukair was born in 1941 in Jerusalem, and grew up there. With a Masters degree in Philosophy and Sociology he worked for many years as a teacher, journalist and editor-in-chief of cultural magazines. He was jailed twice by the Israeli authorities, lasting nearly two years, and in 1975 was deported to Lebanon. He returned to Jerusalem in 1993 after living in Beirut, Amman and Prague. He is the author of 25 books, nine short story collections, 13 works for children, a biography and a travelogue. He has written six drama series for TV, three plays and countless newspaper and magazine articles.Some of his short stories have been published in French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese, as well as English.

After a lifetime working as a professor of Arabic literature and a translator of contemporary Arab authors into English, the author now regales his readers with a rich medley of tales that will continue to resonate long after the book is put down. His characters are mainly migrants to Canada and the USA from Palestine Lebanon and Syria, starting their lives again, dealing with their memories, with pasts that cannot be recalled, with exile, with just being immigrants. The stories question how they have lived their lives. How did they settle into a new life? What happened to all the old relationships? How did they go about making new ones? Was it possible still to love? To fall in love again? Did they find happiness in their new country?Issa J. Boullata is a Palestinian author, literary critic and translator, born in Jerusalem. He is formerly Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has written numerous non-fiction literary works, including Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (1990), A Window on Modernism: Studies in the Works of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Rocks and a Wisp of Soil (2005) in Arabic.He has one novel in Arabic, A'id ila al-Quds (1998). His translations include Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's memoirs Princesses' Street (2005) and The First Well (1995), Mohamed Berrada's The Game of Forgetting (1986), Emily Nasrallah's Flight Against Time (1997), and Ghada Samman's The Square Moon (1998).

Knife Sharpener – Selected Poems is a posthumous commemoration and celebration of Sargon Boulus, in a collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, "Poetry and Memory", written a few months before he died in October 2007. With a Foreword by Adonis and an Introduction by Dublin poet and publisher Pat Boran, the volume includes nine pages of photographs and tributes from fellow poets and writers Saadi Youssef, Ounsi El-Hage, Amjad Nasser, Abbas Beydhoun, Abdo Wazen, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Khalid al-Maaly, and Elias Khoury, assembled and translated by fellow Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who described his death as leaving "a gaping wound in the heart of modern Arabic poetry". "Sargon seemed to feel also the even greater, historical weight of conflicts, tensions, misunderstandings and oppressions of the spirit, as if his poems came through his own time and language but from somewhere else." – Pat BoranSargon Boulus was unusually influential among young Arab poets, who "found in him the father who refused to practise his patriarchy and a poet who always renewed himself in his rebellion against rhetoric . . ." Abdo WazenFor all Banipal Books titles available with Inpress, go to this link http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/product_listing2.aspx?productcategory=translated+poetry

Shortlisted for the 2011 Popescu Prize for Poetry Translated from a European Language into English, run by the Poetry Society.Foreword by Ruth Padel and introduced by Victor Schiferli."With this collection Anglophone readers are introduced to a poet of global scope," writes renowned American poet Marilyn Hacker.Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr, born in 1974 in Rotterdam into a Palestinian-Dutch family, was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. A man of many passions, including classical music, drama, poetry and travel, as city poet of Antwerp in 2005 his appearances were attended like pop concerts."There is an exuberance and energy about these poems – poems for the voice and for performance, which nonetheless sit beautifully on the page and move easily between playfulness and a great humanity. Ramsey Nasr in David Colmer's translation has a strong appeal to new generations of poetry readers."Poetry SocietyThe poems in Heavenly Life were selected by the poet from his collections and from works written as poet laureate. His translator is the award-winning David Colmer, joint-winner of the 2010 IMPAC prize for his translation of The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, who has dynamically recreated in English the patterns and sounds of Ramsey's inventive, bold and thoughtful poems.The collection includes the poem which voted Nasr into his laureate post – in the Netherlands the laureate is chosen by popular vote. Another is a three-part poem inspired by the life of Dmitri Shostakovich and based on his Sonata for Viola and Piano. The title poem 'Heavenly Life', meanwhile, was written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler's birth and is based on his Fourth Symphony, the four sections of the poem echoing the structure, tone and length of its movements. It is named after 'Das himmlische Leben', the song that forms the symphony's finale.Ramsey Nasr was in conversation with Ruth Padel and read from Heavenly Life at the LRB's World Literature Weekend on 18th June, and last November performed at 2 events of the 2010 Poetry International at London's Southbank Centre."David Colmer's translations follow Nasr's almost prosaic lines and shifts in register, rarely missing a beat and catching his humour with low-key contemporary phrasing. These are very readable versions of poems that provide a window on what is going on in Dutch society at the moment." Donald Gardner, reviewing Heavenly Life in Ambit 205"This is a poet who takes the pulse of his age, presses charges against injustice and oppression, without forgetting the heartbeat of his predecessors."Paul Demets in the Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen

In July 2026 Banipal Books releases a reprint of the revised third edition of An Iraqi in Paris in English translation which has been out of print for almost a year. The paperback reprint, not the e-book has a completely new design, with new cover and a total of 336 pages. An Iraqi in Paris is known throughout the Arab world as the best-selling “gem of autobiographical writing”, by an author who has been called “a relentless raconteur”, “a modern Odysseus”, “the Iraqi Don Quixote”. Providentially leaving Iraq just before Saddam Hussein installs himself as President, the Assyrian narrator of An Iraqi in Paris, Samuel Shimon, dreams of becoming a Hollywood film-maker after his hero John Ford, but after arrest and torture in Syria – accused of being a Jewish spy on account of his name, similar treatment in Jordan, and escaping execution in Lebanon by armed militia, he eventually lands on the streets of Paris, where he meets up with Jean Valjean and tries to escape his fate as a homeless refugee with wit, humour and amorous adventures, all the while writing the story of his childhood, his deaf-mute father Kika, and film buff Kiryakos. After all his experiences, Samuel Shimon, “the runaway from museums”, writes an urgently needed and timely “manifesto of tolerance”. Translated from the Arabic by Christina Phillips and Piers Amodia with the author.

Banipal magazine’s 60th issue presents a major feature on the influential Egyptian author Alaa al-Deeb, with translations from his pivotal works and articles by six fellow Egyptian writers. Other authors include Safi Said (Tunisia), Abdallah Uld Mohamadi Bah (Mauritania), Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Sudan) and two poets from Tunisia and Syria.

A Boat to Lesbos is a powerful and compelling epic poem, written while thousands of Syrian refugees were enduring frightening journeys across the Mediterranean before arriving on the small island. Set out like a Greek tragedy, it is passionate and dramatic witness to the horrors and ravages suffered by Syrian families forced to flee their destroyed country, seen through the eye of history, the poetry of Sappho and the travels of Odysseus. Plus poems written while the poetry visited Lesbos during the refugee crisis.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis have created a revolution in literature, writing nearly 600 novels. Banipal's first issue of 2018 focuses on this unexpected journey in Iraqi fiction with articles and chapters from selected novels. Plus two poets and the 6 Shortlisted novels of the 2018 IPAF.

“Travels” features five Arab travel writers: Iraqi Farouk Yousif in New York; Tunisian Hassouna Mosbahi in Andalucia; Algerian Said Khatibi in Sarajevo; Moroccan-Dutch Abdelkader Benali in Tangiers and Syrian-Danish Monir Almajid in Japan. Plus profiles on Jordanian Kafa Al-Zou‘bi and British poet Linda France, and other fiction and poetry works.

In Goat Mountain, Habib Selmi’s first novel, published in Arabic in 1988, a young man’s journey begins in a dilapidated old bus that takes four hours to reach Al-‘Ala, from where he takes a long ride on mule back, accompanied by a mysterious older man who is to play an important part in the young man’s new life. They finally arrive at Goat Mountain, a forlorn, Tunisian desert village. The school is a single room. The youth passes the first night in the house of his uncommunicative guide, whose name is Ismail . . . He grows more uneasy and depressed as Ismail becomes ever more powerful until, with a new truck and his own private army, Ismail dominates village life and casts a menacing shadow over the young man.

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.

Taleb Alrefai turns a spotlight on Kuwait’s pearl-fishing history in this enthralling fictional re-telling of that fateful day, 19 February 1979, when the country’s famous dhow shipmaster Captain Al-Najdi is lost at sea in a treacherous storm. In between fishing for seabream with two friends, the retired mariner looks back on how the sea has been calling him since childhood, on the punishing work of pearl-divers, and how he became a captain at 14. As he recalls his voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, some with renowned Australian sailor Alan Villiers, he meditates on how the sea was abandoned when pearl-fishing ended with the discovery of synthetic pearls and oil. In a kind of revenge, howling winds and enormous black waves suddenly erupt and quickly engulf the small fishing boat.

This open work was written in defiance of the “sanctity of genre” and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. First published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, it has been variously called a novel or a prose poem, while the author calls it an epic in prose, divided as it is into cantos. In mid-1960s Iraq such an open-ended form, in which different genres could come together and blend into each other, was difficult to even imagine. For Fadhil al-Azzawi it was the core of a new vision of life after the country’s tough political experiences, especially the bloody coup of February 1963, and then abysmal defeat in the June 1967 Six-Day War. The preface to the original Arabic edition noted: “Everything in this open novel returns to itself and acquires its own particular innocence, even in language, so that the novel becomes a poem, a play, a film, a painting and a piece of music all at once without ever meaning to [. . .] It talks about itself in its own very particular way, where it says nothing specific so that it can say everything.”

The Madness of Despair tells the story of Maliha, who is living in London with her husband Nafie after an arranged marriage in their distant Arab homeland. The couple become good friends with Doctor Nadim, a fellow exile, but in the twists and turns of the friendship, the men’s nostalgia for their old lives – and old ways of living – come into conflict with Maliha’s ambition to live and love freely and make something of her new life now she’s settled in London. Though ready to throw off the constraints of her disastrous marriage at the slightest turn, Maliha is ill-prepared for the fire of emotions that overcomes her, leading to unforeseen consequences for all three. It is a powerful narrative that reveals just how much psychological suffering and cultural displacement can upset the most ordinary of aspirations for life and love.

Ahmed Morsi is a renowned painter as well as a prolific art critic, journalist, translator, and, as this book reveals to a new audience, a consummate poet, with his debut collection published at the age of 19. Poems of Alexandria and New York, Ahmed Morsi’s first volume in English translation, captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his works, his surrealistic humour, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life. It comprises two of his best known collections, Pictures from the New York Album and Elegies to the Mediterranean, both written when he resumed writing poetry following a break of nearly 30 years after the calamitous Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. The former opens up the city of New York, his home since the mid-1970s and where he still lives and works, while the latter takes readers deep into abiding memories of the Mediterranean city of his birth, Alexandria, Egypt.

From the Introduction by Mohammed Sawaie:The Palestinian poets included in The Tent Generations, Palestinian Poems represent different age groups and backgrounds, yet they all express a strong sense of “Palestinian-ness”. They include Israeli citizens, the offspring of those who remained in Palestine after 1948. They also include poets who lived or continue to live in the West Bank and Gaza, areas that are still occupied, or controlled by Israelis as of this writing. Finally, they include poets born in Palestine, but whose families were expelled, or migrated to neighboring Arab countries as a result of the Arab-Israeli wars of the Nakba in 1948, and then of 1967 and 1973.The educational backgrounds of the poets represented here vary. Salem Jubran, Samih al-Qasim, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Marwan Makhoul, for example, were products of the Israeli educational system. Others attended institutions of learning in various Arab countries. Fadwa Tuqan received little formal education in her city of Nablus; she, however, acquired instruction in language, support in writing poetry, and encouragement to publish her poems from her brother, the well-known poet Ibrahim Tuqan, mentioned previously. All these poems are written in fusha Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, the codified literary, written language shared by educated speakers of Arabic in their various respective regions. Palestinian folkloric poetry, referred to as al-Shi’r al-Sha’bi or Shi’r al-‘Ammiyya, is not included in this work. Folk poetry, richly expressed orally in the Palestinian dialect, ‘Ammiyya, embraces a variety of themes (national pride, panegyric, love, generosity toward guests/strangers, and so on), including the political themes expressed in the poems in this work. There is a rising interest in collecting and preserving this folkloric poetry, and several anthologies of oral poetry as well as studies have recently appeared.The 1948 Nakba, the wars of 1967 and 1973, and their subsequent tragic impact find expression in the work of Palestinian poets. Some of the authors in this collection had firsthand experience of the loss of home, and the up-rootedness from and destruction of their villages and cities. Others acquired knowledge of such experiences, the tragedy that befell Palestinians, through stories told by grandparents or parents, stories of hardship and deprivation transmitted from one generation to another. Thus, poets express in vocabulary specific to the Palestinian experience of the dispossession of homeland, the forced expulsion, the pain of living in the miserable conditions of refugee camps in the diaspora.

Banipal 70 – Mahmoud Shukair, Writing Jerusalem is a rich issue of diverse authors and literary news to inspire and enthuse you in this continuing time of Covid-19.The main feature on Palestinian author Mahmoud Shukair is a gift to the great Jerusalemite on his 80th birthday – which took place in March this year – with articles, short stories, reviews of his two collections in English translation, and his trilogy of novels of Jerusalem family life.Two recent Arabic novels are reviewed and excerpted: At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Iraqi author Azher Jirjees, and No One Prayed over Their Graves by Syrian author Khaled Khalifa. Also included, a memorable short story “A Bicycle Brings an Old Comrade” by Egyptian author Hassan Abdel Mawgoud.Lebanese author Alawiya Sobh talks to Katia al-Tawil about her latest novel To Love Life, with three chapters excerpted.Guest writer is Gibraltarian poet and translator Trino Cruz, working in both Spanish and English, with selected poems from The Fertile Shore.Plus an interview with the editors of the Maktoob project, which translates and publishes Arabic literature in Hebrew.

Sarajevo Firewood, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) award in 2020, explores the legacy of the recent histories of two countries — Algeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina — both of which experienced traumatic, and ultimately futile, civil wars in the 1990s. The novel narrates the lives of two main characters, with their friends and families: Salim, an Algerian journalist, and Ivana, a young Bosnian woman, both of whom have fled the destruction and hatred of their own countries to try to build a new life in Slovenia. As Ivana pursues her goal of writing her ‘dream play’, Khatibi’s novel brings to life in fictional form the memories and experiences of the countless ordinary people who survived the atrocities linking the two countries. As such, it represents both a lasting memorial to the thousands of dead and ‘disappeared’ of the two countries’ civil conflicts, but also a powerful and novel exploration of the experience of exile to which so many have been subjected over the last few decades.

This is young Palestinian author Shada Mustafa’s debut novel – a free-flowing narrative that interrogates, in short, direct sentences, the memories of growing up, falling in love, that keep forcing themselves out to be reckoned with. Through ceaseless questioning, and the seemingly random revisiting of each of the four “things” she has left behind, the narrator redeems her life from the inexplicable pain and tragic anguish that was her childhood in an occupied and divided land and family. In so doing, Mustafa creates a unique writing style while at the same time allowing the narrative its original, cathartic function, liberating herself from her past, and finding her true self. Why was she always having to cross the Qalandia checkpoint to see her dad or her mom? Why did they divorce? Why was her mom angry? How could she make her happy? Why was her dad a different man when he came out of the occupier’s prison? What was more important, the cause or the people? The questions become more urgent when she becomes a student and falls in love. This short novel, original in its subject as much as its narrative technique, has been singled out from the start by being shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Young Authors.

This unique feature on Iraqi Jewish writers includes short stories, excerpts from novels, and poems – written by 17 authors – all of whom are of Iraqi descent. For several centuries, Iraqi Jews were key contributors to Iraq’s rich social and cultural tapestry – active in all areas of life as novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, musicians, composers, singers, and artists. Sadly, all this came to a tragic end with the massive transfer-emigration and forced displacement of Iraqi Jews in the 1950s to Israel. The feature also includes introductory essays about the authors and poets, who are of different generations, traversing a wide range of languages – from the poetry of the Mani brothers at the turn of the 20th century to the works of Almog Behar and Mati Shemoelof in the early noughties. The texts raise universal questions of belongingness, exile, diaspora, cross-national affinities, and cross-linguistic possibilities. All texts were either translated directly from Arabic (approximately two-thirds) or from Hebrew, with one written originally in English.

Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah brings to life a story that can never again be lost in time after a single line in Aramaic on a tombstone fired his imagination. This inspiring epic poem awakens two extraordinary lovers, Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and Regina, the Celtic slave he freed and married, from where they have lain at rest beside Hadrian’s Wall for eighteen centuries, and tells their unique story. Barates’ elegy to his beloved wife, who died young at 30, is, however, not about mythologising history. With the poet himself an exile in Britain for 40 years from his birthplace of Damascus, the poem forges new connections with today, linking al-Jarrah’s personal journey with that of his ancient forebear Barates, who resisted slavery with love. Barates’ Eastern song also questions whether the young Celtic fighters, the Tattooed Ones, were really barbarians, as they emerged from forest mists to defend their hills and rivers and their way of life from the Romans, and died or lay wounded at the twisting stone serpent that was Hadrian’s Wall.

Impoverished Egyptian teacher Helmy is deperate to find a better life for himself, his wife and little boy, seeing no future at home in Cairo. He dreams of working in oil-rich Kuwait and its boom in construction being the answer, just like many thousands before him. He manages to borrow the huge cost of a visa and is at last on his way to Kuwait City. He has no idea of the nightmare, instead of the dream, that awaits him – the relentless summer sun with temperatures of 56ºC and more, the choking dust and sweat, having to do construction work instead of teaching. And always, no money, and no answers from the many managers Helmy comes up against. Instead of achieving his dream, he falls into trap after trap. The author is himself a character in the novel, an engineer with the construction company who is writing a story about the humiliating and degrading experiences of the migrant foreign workers arriving in Kuwait to make their fortunes.

Iraqi Said Jensen, living in Norway, is forever haunted by the ghost of his father, killed by the Iraqi regime before he was born, and nightmarish visions. On being called to Baghdad where a mass grave, possibly holding his father’s remains, will be opened, he thinks about the peaceful cherry orchard his neighbour Jakob was laid to rest in.Through the story of Iraqi Said Jensen, who is granted asylum in Norway and builds his life there but is forever haunted by his father’s disappearance, Iraqi author Azher Jirjees’s debut novel captures brilliantly the way Iraqi life flips from reality to unreality and back as people have to find ways to live with the bloody horrors and deprivation that count as ‘normal life’, leading to countless people fleeing and countless others thrown into mass graves. A monumental account of human endurance in the face of mounting horrors.

In this thriller-cum-jigsaw puzzle, two storylines play out across continents and true historical events as American novelist Christine McMillan and student Rachid Bennacer aim to solve The Secrets of Folder 42, while chess champion Zouhair Belkacem, shunted off to medical school in Moscow, returns to Morocco in time for a spectacular crunch day.

Birds of Nabaa is a tale of physical and spiritual journeys, from the narrator’s beginnings in Nabaa, a remote Mauritanian village, whose herds lead the community according to their own inscrutable instincts, to life in Madrid, the Gulf states and Guinea, where his work as an embassy accountant takes him, and back to Nabaa and Nouakchott. Inspired by the Sahara of his childhood and devoted from an early age to the vagabond life of the pre-Islamic poets, the narrator’s constant life on the move in search of the inner stillness known only to desert dwellers leads him back always to the music, song and poetry so much a part of Mauritanian life and the spiritual universe of Sufism. The narrator’s travels take him to the village of Kanz al-Asrar near a tributary of the Senegal River, an area so fertile it is like a lush paradise. However, two and more years without any rain create drought, wells dry out, livelihoods shatter, and dreams turn to disturbing and nightmarish premonitions of disaster. The burning fire of the sun is winning its eternal struggle with the hidden water that the clouds plant in the depths of the sand. As desertification takes hold, that paradise of southern Mauritania and of Nabaa gradually declines and the waves of migration, always a feature of life in the Sahara, intensify.

During the modernisation of Muscat, people’s spirits seemed to harden and dry up, and one day the female jinn just disappeared. Where did they go to? Have they all died, are they in hiding after losing out to electricity and cement, to air conditioners and televisions? Has life lost its playfulness and joy without the transformational powers of the jinn? Are life’s sweet moments of pleasure and sensual delight no more, now the inhabitants are weighed down with daily chores, boring work, and all the routines apparently necessary for modern life? It seemed so, until a group of enterprising women, all mothers and wives overburdened with one thing after another, decided they had to somehow recover the powers of the lost female jinn. Omani author Huda Hamed recounts the vivid stories Zubayda and her seven friends tell each other, revealing secrets until then suppressed, as on one special night they transform into Cinderellas. Though not searching for a prince, they meet together in Chef Ramon’s restaurant on the beach front of Muscat for a few hours of precious independence before midnight comes.