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New Writing from the Arab World
by Samuel Shimon
Book Reviewed by:An exciting collection of the best new writing from the Arab world, by thirty-nine writers under thirty-nine.
Beirut is the 2009 World Book Capital, as designated by UNESCO, and at the center of the festivities, in collaboration with the world-renowned Hay Festival, is a competition to identify the thirty-nine most promising young talents in Arab literature. The selection of the “Beirut 39” follows the success of a similar competition in the 2007 World Book Capital, Bogotá, celebrating achievements in Latin American literature.
This year, for the first time, the winners—nominated by publishers, literary critics, and readers across the Arab world and internationally, and selected by a panel of eminent Arab writers, academics, and journalists—will be published together in a one-of-a-kind anthology. Edited by Samuel Shimon of Banipal magazine, the collection will be published simultaneously in Arabic and English throughout the world by Bloomsbury and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.
Beirut 39 provides an important look at the Arab-speaking world today, through the eyes of thirty-nine of its brightest young literary stars.
This excerpt includes the complete text of Haneef from Glasgow by Mohammad Hassan Alwan
Preface
These thirty-nine Arab writers are all under the age of forty. They
have flung open the doors on Arabic culture, inviting the reader
to transcend cultural boundaries and land in a region known as the
‘Arab World’.
The reader touches, feels, hears, tastes and sees the Middle East
and North Africa as it really is: cosmopolitan cities, villages, towns,
desolate mountains and deserts. And soon these complex places in a
foreign culture become recognisable and familiar as they are revealed
in poems, short stories and extracts from novels. We experience the
aches and pains of imprisoned freedom like birds in a cage; stifling
societies, sexual frustration, corrupt regimes, poverty and illiteracy.
And mapping the soil in which the seeds of fanaticism flourish, good
women are driven to madness by injustice and oppression. The subject
of war, of course, is...
The best of these works frequently underscore darker moments, running the gamut from a bombing and a book-burning to schoolyard bullying, but do so without criticizing the characters nor the conditions of the societies which shaped them. Read together, a sense of restlessness -- of migrations from village to city, from childhood to adulthood, from living with hesitation to gradually accepting fate -- emerges. These stories dig at human fallibilites with imaginative risks.
Browse brief bios of the 39 contributing authors...continued
Full Review
(652 words)
(Reviewed by Karen Rigby).
Beirut 39 derives its title from 'Beirut39', a group of thirty-nine writers of Arab heritage who were all born in or after 1970. The countries of origin represented in the anthology include Palestine, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Oman, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt, among others.
These writers met for workshops, readings, and discussions as part of the Hay Festival, a week-long literary event held in early summer in Haye-on-Wye, a town in the west of England widely known for its bookshops. Once called the "Woodstock of the mind" by Former President Clinton, the festival began in 1988 and is currently sponsored by the British newspaper, The Guardian.
Drawing nearly 80,000 visitors each year, the Hay Festival has also inspired sister ...
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