Il Manifesto, May, 2020
In an interview to Il Manifesto, Hoda Barakat, first woman to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic fiction 2019 (or Arab Booker) shares:

“This is the story of a noble people, rooted in the plains of civilization and the park of history”

Listen to the interview here.

Interviewed by Lena Bopp for FAZ, April 13, 2020
In his novels, Khaled Khalifa goes to court with the Syrian regime. Nevertheless, the writer still lives in Damascus and voluntarily returns to his home country from every trip abroad. How can that be?
 

By Maya Jaggi, published by The Guardian, on April 15, 2020
Midway through Dima Wannous’s novel, the narrator recalls a neighbour who fell sick during a dire shortage of doctors and medicine. The woman’s daughter had to take time off work to hunt for a hospital bed. “So, silently, I begged my own mother not to fall ill,” she says, to “not contract a virus or other disease.”
As well as having a chilling resonance today, the anecdote offers a glimpse of daily life for millions of Syrians since the 2011 revolution. …

By Sinan Antoon, Iraqi author, Published on December 16, 2019, by The New York Times.

Safa al-Sarray was killed when Iraqi forces fired a tear-gas canister at his head.

Iraqis have been protesting since early October against the dysfunctional and corrupt political system installed by the United States after the 2003 occupation. Unlike previous waves of protests that began in 2011, this protest was spontaneous and not organized by any party.
The most common and passionate slogan throughout these protests has been, “We want a homeland.” It reflected the anger and alienation Iraqis felt toward …