Over at CairoScene, Hassan Tarek reports on book-buying trends in Cairo, with a focus on sales at the Diwan bookstore chain.

This story comes from Hussein al-Abri's latest collection, Time Slips Away in the Corner (2026).

Book Review: Ansam Abu Sitta’s ‘Bench of the Reserves’ Reviewed by Nada Hodali Live in the present moment, do not miss out on what is happening there in front of you! Why are you always stuck in the past? Most of us have had this line thrown at us in different situations. In the case of being a Palestinian, however, being stuck either in the past or the future has become a survival mechanism for them.

There are events around the world this September 25-27 celebrating the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, after the Arab World Institute and Centre Pompidou declared September 25 to be "Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day."

We're seeing an unprecedented number of new books on Palestine, politics, culture, and resistance.

“Though I know I did not stop the genocide, I know that I did not accelerate it either. That is not nothing.”

It's Publication Day for the Penguin edition of Batool Abu Akleen's debut poetry collection 48kg, with translations by Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. 

"I’m sitting alone in my room / my clothes scattered around me"

A response to Abdeljawad Omar's "The Failure to Crossover"; an essay from the Refusing Complicity project

Today is the Dublin launch of ArabLit contributor Alaa Alqaisi’s The Thin Border: Living in Extra Time. It is available through Skein Press.

Yesterday, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Nour Balousha wrote these two poems "after I stopped screaming, not because it ended, but because I grew too exhausted to keep screaming."

Mostafa Khraïef (1910-1967) was a prominent Tunisian poet, writer, and journalist.

Palestinian author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s archive documenting more than six decades of life in Palestine has arrived for safekeeping at two universities in the United Kingdom

Palestinian author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s archive documenting more than six decades of life in Palestine has arrived for safekeeping at two universities in the United Kingdom

A conversation with Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan about her latest novel, Lebanon, memory, patriarchy, migration – and why literature is stronger than a manifesto

Doha, September 08 (QNA) – The Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding has received 256 nominations from...

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Aw...

What Laila Lalami’s ‘Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’ reveals about migration, belonging, and the human stories behind the numbers. By Meriem Essaoudy.

As a way of marking #WorldKidLitMonth, we are refreshing this profile of 10 publishers that have a focus on children’s literature in Arabic.

As a way of marking #WorldKidLitMonth, we are refreshing this profile of 10 publishers that have a focus on children's literature in Arabic.

The Book of Damascus, ed. Zaher Omareen, is a new anthology in their “Reading the City” series. Here, editor Zaher Omareen talks with Fifi Bat-hef about selecting ten stories to represent a city as…

"Music is one of the arts most connected to place, as it is a physical vibration in a space."

Dear friends, family, colleagues, and community,

I am sadto the point where sadness can go no further—not a single drop left.It is purely physical really.Ask a sponge.This certainty came to mewhen my

Shamma Al Bastaki records memories of life around Dubai Creek, while contributors in Gaza and the West Bank write amid the war

The Book of Damascus, ed. Zaher Omareen, is a new anthology in their “Reading the City” series. Here, editor Zaher Omareen talks with Fifi Bat-hef about selecting ten stories to represent a city as complex and storied as Damascus.

TMR’s Literary Editor reflects on what created the Anthropocene—capitalism, imperial violence, ecocide—and the possibility of undoing it.

Abdul Latif Abu Hashim and Haneen Al-Amassi preserved and digitized more than 258 endangered manuscripts in the battered territory.

Only one title translated from Arabic was on the longlists for the 2026 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose, announced yesterday: I Have Brought You a Severed Hand by Ghayath Almadhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books.

Egyptian author-translator Yasmine Zohdi is one of five writers shortlisted for this year's Caine Prize, which celebrates short stories by African authors.

This poem originally appeared in our 2021 SONG issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

A story from the fall of 1983 by the scribe of Basra, Muhammad Khudayyir.

This month, we have books and events coming in September 2026, as well as one we missed from the end of August.

This month, we have books and events coming in September 2026, as well as one we missed from the end of August.

Yesterday evening, American University in Cairo Press announced the shortlist for the 2026 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Atheer al-Nashmi: When Love Becomes Both Adversary and Judge Teenage romances, or an imaginative pattern? By Mohsen Al-Wayili Asked once whether any of her novels were an autobiography, the Saudi novelist Atheer al-Nashmi told the daily al-Eqtisadiah in 2016: "I am not so naïve as to write my life into a novel. But into every novel I write, and every novel I will one day write, I put something of myself and about myself." Years later, when the same confusion between the novel and its author resurfaced, she told…

For Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), we take you on a tour of work by four Libyan women writers. For more on the Libyan literary scene, visit ArabLit’s June 2026 newsletter for publishing professionals. Four Libyan Women Writers You Should Read By Masoud Masoud As leading Libyan writer Najwa Bin Shatwan said in a 2020 interview with Orna Herr…

"In her poetry world, the sun is red. The moon is purple. Snow is ubiquitous. Winter is eternal."

Originally published in December 2012, “Where Is Everybody?” is a celebrated essay by Egyptian writer and novelist Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, later collected in Coffee with Uranium, first published in 2012. With his characteristic wit and skepticism, Tawfik explores the enduring fascination with extraterrestrial life and the Fermi Paradox, asking what it really means if, after all our searching, we are truly alone in the universe.