In the spring of 2014, Ahmad Saadawi’s book Frankenstein in Baghdad was awarded the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the Arab Booker. It is a novel of a kind quite different from the ones generally acclaimed by the public or by critics, and from those that have come to me for consideration in the past few years. Whatever its originality or flaws, its being awarded the IPAF could be the sign of an interesting change to come.
 
As I celebrate this fall my tenth year as a literary …

When asked about the challenges of selling world translation rights of Arabic fiction, one’s first response is naturally always focused on the potential acquirers. It is a fact that Arabic is not widely read in the international publishing industry, and this indubitably has consequences on the access non-Arab publishers have to Arabic literature

On the eve of their fifth birthday, Twitter published some remarkable stats. On average per day: 140 million tweets and 460,000 new accounts. Without a doubt, we are living interesting times. The dematerialization of cultural products is in the process of revolutionizing the notion of “book”. User generated content, online publishing tools and mostly social media are empowering individuals both in the virtual world and on the streets, and appear to be in the process of revolutionizing the notion of “authorship”.

Written for and published by Publishing perspectives, @pubperspectives

During a meeting with an Emirati young free-lance journalist, it struck me as being potentially true: Arabic language is threatened by the weakness of its presence and usefulness on the web.

By the year 2002, two key studies linking Arab human development to the book industry had been published: The UNESCO report on Arab book production and the Arab Human Development Report, ADHR.

As a literary agent specialized in representing Arabic literature for world translation rights, I am often asked how visible Arabic literature is on the international scene. This question most of the time translates into: ‘how many copies do books translated from the Arabic sell?’