Category: Iraq

  • Women’s Nonfiction on Political Detention: From Iraq to Palestine

    via Arabic Literature (in English)  &  MLYNXQUALEY on MARCH 27, 2018 • ( 0 ) “Keep still, the stories will come to you if you listen” By Nora Parr Photo by Amal Eqeiq Between them, the nine authors collected into Hafla li-Tha’ira [A Party for Thai’ra/the Revolutionary] lived nearly 50 years in Israeli prison. They […]

  • From Dunya Mikhail’s Forthcoming ‘The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq’

    via World Literature Today and Arabic Literature (in English) & BY MLYNXQUALEY on DECEMBER 29, 2017 • ( 0 ) Max Weiss translated this excerpt of Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, which is forthcoming next spring from New Directions: The book is dedicated to Abdullah Shrem, who worked, between 2014 and […]

  • The Digitization Process at Iraq’s National Library

    via Arab Literature (in English): BY MLYNXQUALEY on AUGUST 8, 2015 • ( 0 ) The Associated Press recently ran a brief story about digitization and restoration efforts at the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad: Digitization efforts have been ongoing for several years, as noted in this 2013 International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) […]

  • Eight Years Later, Mutanabbi Street

    BY MLYNXQUALEY on FEBRUARY 1, 2015 • ( 0 ) The battle over memories and representations of Iraq in US discourse rages, not just writ large, as in the discussions over American Sniper, but also in individual spaces, like Baghdad’s central bookselling corridor:  In the American news, the usual way of remembering/forgetting the bombing that rocked […]

  • The Struggle Against Borders and for Autonomy in Kurdistan

    by Ali Bektaş [via RETORT where Iain Boal added this note: The text of this dispatch was received from Ali on 25.vii.14. It reflects the situation in Rojava during the third week of July. Apologies to AT for the delay in editing (23.viii.14). IB] Temmuz, 2014 A Turkish armored personnel carrier patrolling the zone separating the Kurds between Turkey […]

  • ‘Baghdad Writes!

    via Arabic Literature (in English) by mlynxqualey A cheer went up in the conference hall when the winner to the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced: It was Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi for his novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad. The cheers were echoed across social media. Photo credit: Chip Rossetti. Iraqi poet, novelist, and scholar […]

  • Iraqi Authors on ‘A Decade of Despair’

    Via & thanks to the as always excellent blog Arab Literature (in English): Posted on March 21, 2013 by mlynxqualey | Leave a comment This is the month, the week, the fifteen minutes that the world is grappling with and reflecting on the US-led invasion of Iraq. But it’s been more than fifteen minutes for Iraqi authors; particularly those, like […]

  • “Fire Won’t Eat Me Up:” Iraqi Poet Manal al Sheik

    In Roxana Vilk’s short film, “Fire Won’t Eat Me Up,” Manal Al Sheikh says it is dangerous for her to be a writer in her hometown of Nineveh, Iraq, so she now engages readers online from Norway. The documentary, produced for Al Jazeera’s “Artscape: Poets of Protest” series, follows Al Sheikh as she prepares for […]

  • Nostalgia, My Enemy

    Saadi Youssef, born in 1934 in Basra, Iraq, has lived in exile for some 30 years now — currently in London, England. Mahmood Darwish has called him a major influence, saying that “Saadi Youssef, whose poetry is in dialogue with the history of popetry, is like no other Arab poet… I was enchanted by his […]

  • Sinan Antoon’s Iraq War Diary

    Last month, the excellent Jadaliyya site published extracts from poet-writer-translator Sinan Antoon’s Iraq war-time diary entitled A Barbarian in Rome. Below the opening paras: [The following are excerpts from a longer text in the form of a diary kept during the war] “ I have freed millions from barbarism.” George W. Bush, The Guardian, Sunday, June 15, 2008. i. […]