The rise of Arabic literature in the West

But what are the consequences of this for writers and their readers? Does awareness of a wider (non-Arab) audience affect the way that Arab writers write? And in what ways do different audiences – not to mention publishers in different countries – have differing perceptions of their work?

These were some of the tantalising questions tackled during a panel discussion at the Shubbak festival in London on July 25.

“When I was a student,” British-Syrian writer Robin Yassin-Kassab recalled, “just about the only stuff in terms of literature that was translated and available in bookshops was Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel prize winner, and Nawal el-Saadawi (the Egyptian feminist) … and now, when you look on Amazon, there suddenly seems to be a lot more stuff, and there are all these events – Arab arts festivals, and so on.”

The size of Shubbak’s audience – almost 200 people willing to pay for tickets – testified to the level of interest, but why should non-Arabs bother with Arabic literature? Marcia Lynx Qualey, who runs the arablit website, gave what might seem the obvious answer. Reading is freedom, she said, and reading outside her own cultural tradition exposes her not just to different points of view but to a different way of constructing literature: “Arabic literature has 1,500 years of different ways of using words.”