Tayeb Salih was a Sudanese writer, cultural journalist for the BBC Arabic programme as well as for Arabic journals, and a staff member of UNESCO. He is best known for his novel Season of Migration to the North, considered to be one of the most important novels in Arabic literature. His novels and short stories have been translated into English and more than a dozen other languages.
Hoda Barakat is a Lebanese novelist. She lived most of her early life in Beirut before moving to Paris, where she now resides. She has published six novels, two plays, a book of short stories, and a book of memoirs. Her works are originally written in Arabic and have been translated into English, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Romanian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek.
Ghadah Al-Samman is a Syrian writer, journalist and novelist born in Damascus in 1942 to a prominent and conservative Damascene family. Her father was Ahmed Al-Samman, a president of the University of Damascus. She is distantly related to poet Nizar Qabbani, and was deeply influenced by him after her mother died at a very young age.
Syrian literature is modern fiction written or orally performed in Arabic by writers from Syria since the independence of the Syrian Arab Republic in 1946. It is part of the historically and geographically wider Arabic literature. Literary works by Syrian authors in the historical region of Syria since the Umayyad era are considered general Arabic literature. In its historical development since the beginnings of compilations of the Quran in the 7th century and later written records, the Arabic language has been considered a geographically comprehensive, standardized written language due to the religious or literary works written in classical Arabic. This sometimes differs considerably from the individual regionally spoken variants, such as Syrian, Egyptian or Moroccan spoken forms of Arabic.
Mansoura Ez-Eldin is an Egyptian novelist and journalist.
Fatma Yousif al-Ali is a Kuwaiti journalist and short story writer. A graduate in Arabic Literature from Cairo University, in 1971 she became the first Kuwaiti woman to write a novel. She has also published four collections of short stories. She is a prominent member of the Kuwaiti Literary Association. Her work has been published in Banipal magazine.
Taleb Alrefai is a Kuwaiti journalist and writer, born in Kuwait. An employee of Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts, & Letters, and the monthly tabloid Jaridat Al-Fonoon, a monthly arts tabloid, his novels include Shade of the Sun (1998), Samar's Words (2006) and The Nejdi (al-Najdi) (2017). His work has been published Banipal magazine.
Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature. She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.
Dima Wannous is a Syrian literary writer and journalist. She studied French literature at Damascus University and the University of Paris - Sorbonne. She also studied translation in France and has lived in Beirut, where she worked for the newspapers Al-Hayat and As-Safir. She has also worked for broadcast media.
Mohamed Salah El Azab is an Egyptian writer and novelist.
maia tabet is an Arabic-English literary translator with a background in editing and journalism. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1956, she was raised in Lebanon, India, and England. She studied philosophy and political science at the American University of Beirut and lives between the United States and Cyprus.
Gabriela Babnik is a Slovene writer, literary critic and translator. She has published three novels and her journalistic literary and film criticism regularly appears in national newspapers and magazines in Slovenia.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Huzama Habayeb ) is a Palestinian novelist, storyteller, columnist, translator, and poet who has won multiple awards such as the Mahmoud Seif Eddin Al-Erani Award for Short Stories, Jerusalem Festival of Youth Innovation in Short Stories, and Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. Upon graduating from Kuwait University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts in English language and Literature, she pursued careers in journalism, teaching, and translation before she eventually started to write professionally as a published author. She is a member of both the Jordanian Writers Association and the Arab Writers Federation.
Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist, the first Libyan to ever be shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction. She has authored four novels: Waber Al Ahssina ; Madmum Burtuqali ; Zareeb Al-Abeed ; and Roma Termini, in addition to several collections of short stories, plays and contributions to anthologies. She was chosen as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty by Hay Festival’s Beirut 39 project (2009). In 2018, she was chosen from hundreds of Arab writers for the 2018 Banipal Writing Fellowship Residency at the University of Durham and in 2020, she was chosen to co-lead a series of creative writing workshops in Sharjah for Arab writers. Also, she was chosen as a member of jury in various literary awards/grants.
Lamia Makaddam is a Tunisian poet, journalist and translator.
Rachida el-Charni is a Tunisian writer. She has published three collections of short stories and one novel. Her short story 'Street of the House of Wonders' was in Habila Helon's The Granta Book of the African Short Story - a collection of short stories from prominent African writers, including Chimamanda Adichie, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Doreen Baingana, Henrietta Rose-Innes, E. C. Osondu, Alex La Guma and Camara Laye among others.
Kafa Al-Zou'bi is a Jordanian author. Her novel Cold White Sun was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2019.
June Rain is a 2006 novel written by Lebanese critic and writer Jabbour Douaihy. The novel was published in 2006 by Dar Al-Nahar for Publishing and Distribution by Dar Al-Saqi’s in London. It has been translated to French, Italian, German, and English. The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Mona Al-Shamari is a Kuwaiti novelist and writer. She studied theatre and drama at Kuwait University. She started publishing short stories in the late 1980s; in 1990, one of her stories won a prize from the Emirati Writers' Union. Her first collection of stories was published in 2012. Among her novels are No Music in Al Ahmadi, which was adapted for the screen, and The Maids of the Shrine, which was nominated for the Arabic Booker Prize.
