Margarette Driscoll, for Sunday Times, published June 28, 2015
Photo credit: Ulf Andersen, for the Sunday Times
[ Below a few excerpts ]
The battle for Tal Abyad, a Syrian border town, was playing out as I began The Crossing. The nightly news showed weather-beaten, exhausted refugees flooding to the Turkish border, only to be turned back at the last moment by black-clad Isis fighters blocking their way to freedom. Their despair and distress were visible across the barbed wire fence.
It was somewhere along that border, one night in August 2012, that Samar …

This excerpt was published by The Guardian on June 28, 2015.
Photo credit: The Guardian, Sedat Suna, EPA
The barbed wire lacerated my back. I was trembling uncontrollably. After long hours spent waiting for nightfall, to avoid attracting the attention of Turkish soldiers, I finally raised my head and gazed up at the distant sky, darkening to black. Under the wire fence marking the line of the border a tiny burrow had been dug out, just big enough for one person. My feet sank into the soil and the barbs mauled my back …

This piece is by Andrew Hussey, for The Observer, published June 28th 2015. Read the full article here.
Photo credit: Ed Alcock for The Observer.
As she sits at a cafe table in the 7th arrondissement – elegant and intense, waving around a Gitane for emphasis – it’s hard to imagine a more Parisian figure than the writer Samar Yazbek. Except that she is speaking to me mostly in her native Syrian Arabic (we use an interpreter). And for all her wit and charm, the stories she is telling me are horrifying. …

Very few Saudi writers are translated in Europe. Here is a UFO published by Le Seuil: The Beaver, Mohammed Hasan Alwan, paints a portrait of Saudi Arabi tainted with humour. The society is weighed down by traditions, religion, but is also changing with a very young population that aspires to change.
See more here.
Très peu d’écrivains saoudiens sont traduits en Europe. Voici donc un ovni publié par les éditions du Seuil : Le Castor, de Mohammed Hasan Alwan, dresse un portrait teinté d’humour de l’Arabie Saoudite. Une société plombée par les traditions, le poids de …