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Margaret Obank reads a poem by Amjad Nasser |
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For free culture & tolerance
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BANIPAL 37 IRAQI AUTHORS
Cover 37 Banipal Banipal’s first issue of 2010 celebrates
authors from Iraq with over half its 224 pages devoted to fiction and poetry by
21 writers from different generations, some spread across the world, but many
writing from within the country. We celebrate, in particular, a new generation
of Iraqi fiction writers and poets who are free to write the story of Iraq
we’ve been waiting to hear, however hard. • Writers who are completely new to Western readers are Nazum al-Obeidi and Nassif Falak (who has his own
hair-raising personal story of flight, capture on a number of borders and
imprisonment in Abu Ghraib during the Saddam regime),
the atmospheric writer Enas al-Badran,
Ahmad Saadawi and Shakir Nouri. •
Hussain al-Mozany tells of
a distressing Baghdad he hardly recognises – a jungle of concrete and steel,
“fertile ground for the most dangerous kinds of sectarian violence, corruption
and filth”. •
Lutfiya al-Dulaimi, in her
new novel The Book of the Girls, rivets the reader’s attention with her modern
female characters struggling to find safe haven after suffering violently at
the hands of fanatics. •
Luay Hamza Abbas
and Diya al-Jubaily give
readers short story flashes of very Iraqi daily life – identifying the corpse
of a bullet-ridden old friend, and getting caught in a Friday market bomb
blast. • A pioneer of Iraqi fiction writing is the late Mahdi Issa al-Saqr, who joins the
“new” generation of writers in this feature with an excerpt from his first
novel in English translation, East Winds, West Winds. • The poems from the eleven poets are proclamations of free and
open expression even though Bassim al-Ansar has a
title “I Have Nothing to Say”. PLUS • Glimpses into the powerful fiction of Yemeni author Ali Mohammed
Zayd, of Egyptian novelists Mohamed al-Bisatie and Ezzat el-Kamhawi • An excerpt from Algerian poet Habib Tengour’s historical epic poem Ce
Tatar-là, in translation by Marilyn Hacker • A short
story from Flemish author Rachida Lamrabet, translated from the Dutch. Banipal 37 – IRAQI AUTHORS ( ISSN: 1461-5363)
is available as part of a subscription, or by itself at the price (including
postage) of £8.90 (UK), £10/€15 (Rest of Europe) and £12/$20 (Rest of World)
direct from the address below, online from www.banipal.co.uk or can be ordered
(£7 retail price) from your local bookshop. Banipal
is distributed in the UK and rest of Europe by Central Books
(www.centralbooks.com). For further information contact Banipal
below. BANIPAL,
magazine of modern Arab literature, 1 Gough Square, LONDON EC4A 3DE, UK Tel: +44 (0)
20 7832 1350 Fax: + 44 (0) 20 8568
8509 |
