Bookseller Ahmed Awny recommends five Arabic books by women

Only one Arabic-language writer has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Naguib Mahfouz, who received it back in 1988. Arabic’s marginal status in translated literature has long been a mystery, considering its status as a premier literary language for the past millennium.

The Arab literature that does make it to English speakers tends to be dominated by the same couple of (male) names: Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani. However, recent years have seen an explosion of writing by women in the Arabic world. Even better, much of it is now being translated into English. To find out what should be on our list, we reached out to Ahmed Awny, the managing director of Neukölln’s Khan Aljanub bookstore, for his top five picks.

Iman Mersal – Traces of Enayat

Mersal follows the story of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who committed suicide in 1963, a few years before her only novel, Love and Silence, was published. Traces of Enayat is interesting because it’s not just about al-Zayyat’s story, but also about the whole establishment of Egyptian literature back then. Through her investigations, Mersal uncovers the systematic injustice enforced by the male-dominated cultural scene. It’s a book that tackles politics through a gentle and personal narration.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal is available from And Other Stories, de t ails.

Rania Mamoun – Thirteen Months of Sunrise

This is a beautiful first short story collection that isn’t, I would say, of “anthropological” value, but is simply very well-written. Mamoun’s perspective as a young woman is very rare and valuable, because Sudan is one of the more conservative countries in the Arab world. The world of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, is very richly illustrated, and Mamoun provides a rare insight into this world from which we get very few women’s voices.

Thirteen Months of Sunrise, by Rania Mamoun, is available from Thalia, details.

Fatma Qandil – Empty Cages

Like everywhere, when women in the Arab world write fiction, people read their stories as if they were true. They look for gossip, for the writer’s “real” story. Qandil takes this on by writing a non-fictional book. Of course, it’s called a novel, but from the beginning, you know it’s non-fiction.

She recounts her life in a middle-class Egyptian family, from the 1960s to today, playing with this obsession with the biography of female writers. All the gossip you need is given up front, and then she continues by telling her story in a way that ends up being very daring.

Empty Cages, by Fatma Qandil, is available from the American University in Cairo Press, details.

Adania Shibli – Minor Detail

It’s unusual in Palestinian literature to write in a way that is not obviously lyrical. Because of the weight of Palestine and its history, Palestinian writing is usually expected to be poetic, with this huge emphasis on heroism and sacrifice and other things.

Here, however, Shibli uses very, very sharp sentences to tell her story, examining really very minor details in a way that is one-of-a-kind in Palestinian literature. The novel is a comment on how Palestinians are forced into a certain mode of writing, and burdened by a certain set of expectations.

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, is available from Thailia, details.

Rasha Abbas – Eine Zusammenfassung von allem, was war

Abbas migrated from Syria and today lives in Berlin; I would translate the short story collection’s Arabic title to English as “a brief summary of what happened”. The uniqueness of Abbas’ prose is her sarcasm. Usually, women writing in Arabic aren’t really accepted if they have a sarcastic voice, because sarcasm and comedy tend to be dominated by men in the Arab world. But Abbas uses this sarcasm to look at all these different aspects of urban life, passing between realism and fantasy as well as horror and humour.