Amjad Nasser is the pseudonym of Yahya Numeiri al-Naimat, a London-based Jordanian writer, journalist and poet and one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry and Arabic prose poem. In 1987, Nasser co-founded Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper in London, he worked there in the decades that followed. Despite Nasser’s left-wing political and ideological beliefs his […]
Kadhem Khanjar is a poet and performer from Iraq. Along with some friends he set up a project called ‘the Culture Militia,’ a group which performs poetry in sites of destruction and death including blown-up cars, minefields, bombed out-houses, ambulances, ISIS cages, and mass graves. His collection Picnic with an Explosive Belt was published in […]
Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning Egyptian writer, sculptor, psychiatrist and activist. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she writes a weekly political commentary column and is the author of several works of nonfiction. She was named one of Foreign Policy’s Leading Global Thinkers 2016 for her highly acclaimed debut novel, The […]
Ameer Alhussein is a Syrian Kurdish poet who writes in both Kurdish and Arabic. As a Kurd growing up in Syria under a regime that banned his mother tongue, he learnt to write in Kurdish without any support and outside of any institution. He was part of a group of young poets who published Inferno, […]
Alice Guthrie is a translator, editor and event producer specialising in contemporary Arabic literature and media. Since 2008 her translations have appeared in a range of international publications and venues, her work often focusing on Syria, where she studied Arabic between 2001 and 2003. As an editorial consultant she works bilingually on Arabic-English translations for […]
Najwan Darwish is a Palestinian poet born in Jerusalem. He published his first book of poetry in 2000 and has been an important literary figure ever since. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. The New York Review Books, which published the English translation of […]
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Jordanian-Palestinian poet, novelist, professor, painter and photographer who was born in the Wihdat refugee camp at Amman, Jordan. He studied in the UN agency for Palestine Refugees schools and at the UNRWA Teacher Training College in Amman. He is in charge of cultural activities at Darat-al-Funun in Amman. He has published […]
Bryar Bajalan is a writer, translator and filmmaker presently pursuing a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. His work as a translator from the Arabic and Kurdish has appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation and on the Poetry Foundation website, and his present projects include the translation of poets […]
Zêdan Xelef is a poet and translator from Shingal, the traditional homeland of the Êzîdî people. Forced to relocate to the Chamishko IDP Camp in late 2014, he then completed his studies in translation at the University of Duhok. Xelef’s current projects include translating poetry from Rojava into English and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself […]
Yahya Ashour was born in Gaza in 1998. His debut collection, You are a window, they are clouds, was published in 2018. He studied Sociology and Psychology at the University of Al-Azhar in Gaza.