31 Jan 2012

Radio Debate: Egypt's Revolution One Year On



'Egypt's Revolution One Year On' A Radio debate I participated in with Nawal El Saadawi, Nabila Ramdani and Oliver Pearce.

13 Jan 2012

...and 20 Great Translated Arab Novels


 Following my last post 'The ultimate 100 best English-language novels', I compiled a list of 20 great Arab novels translated into English. This should come in handy for people who are interested in Arabic literature but can't speak Arabic. Unfortunately, there are many novels that have never been translated into English, such as Haidar Haidar's 'Banquet for Seaweed', and others have been translated into German but not English.

12 Jan 2012

The ultimate 100 best English-language novels list


Over the past few years, I have being referring to a number of ‘100 Best Novels’ lists to fill the gaps in my knowledge about literature and discover new authors and novels. The five main lists I have been using are Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the 20th century (English-language), TIME magazine’s all-TIME 100 Novels (1923-2005, English-language), The Observer’s 100 greatest novels of all time, the BBC’s Big Read top 100 novels, and Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century.

I have attempted to compile a definitive list based predominantly on the five lists in addition to a few novels that I thought deserved to be on the list. Because some of the lists are only for English language novels, I thought it’s fair for my list to also have only English-language novels. I am working on another list for international novels.