The following selection of books have been recommended and reviewed by the LEILA project’s jury members who are Arabic literature specialists, many of them translators and writers themselves. These recommendations have been chosen with European publishers in mind, who are interested in finding out more about books from the Arab world. When available, contact information for foreign rights (author, agent, or publisher) is provided.
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Nine short stories that bring Virginia Woolf to Morocco -
Can philosophical enquiry bring us home to our Mother Earth? -
What would happen if all the Palestinians in Israel suddenly disappeared? -
History overwhelms an ordinary family -
A debut collection of deeply affecting poems about a young woman’s experience living through the trauma of the Syrian revolution in 2011 -
A story about a family and the absurdity of civil war written in the magical realism genre -
Syria 2009: political prisoners and asylum seekers live in waiting -
A collection of prose poems set in Iraq of the 1990s and early 2000s -
A view onto the richness of Sudanese Arab and African cultures through an encounter between a warrior and his healer -
Life in a Palestinian village that suddenly becomes a border town in 1948 -
An expelled student becomes a scam artist in Egypt of the 1950s -
A short but pioneering autobiographical work set in northern Syria. -
A collection of poetry about a poet’s life in exile in the US -
A cross-genre book, reflecting on life, death, and theater, by one of the masters of modern Arabic theater -
A passionate soliloquy on Algeria and Algerians -
A novel of ideas by one of Palestine’s preeminent writers -
A journey away from religion to sexuality and pleasure -
The wear and tear on lives in colonial Tunisia
