The LEILA project presents a curated selection of books and authors for European publishers.
The selection was established thanks to a jury that brought together Arabic literature experts, translators, and authors throughout the Euro-Arab region.
The criteria established for the jury involved selecting literature only, including short stories, poetry, biographies, and creative non-fiction, with authors having published at least one work of literature. Jury members selected modern classics, not yet available in smaller European markets, and lesser-known gems that are generally under-translated, with an emphasis on diversity, whether gender, geography, religion, ethnicity, and literary genre.
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Elisabetta Bartuli
Elisabetta Bartuli researches contemporary Arabic literature and trans-cultural dialogue and translates from Arabic to Italian. She is a scout for Arabic Literature at various publishing houses and cultural institutions where she introduces Arab authors. She taught Arabic literature from 2000 to […] Read more
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Hiyem Cheurfa
Hiyem Cheurfa is from Algeria and completed a PhD in postcolonial studies at Lancaster University. She specializes in postcolonial and autobiography studies, and is particularly interested in Arab women’s writing, comedy, and resistance literature. Her book, Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and […] Read more
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Cristina Dozio
Cristina Dozio teaches Arabic Language and Culture at the University of Milan and literary translation from Arabic into Italian at a post-graduate level at SSML Vicenza. She has translated, with Elisabetta Bartuli, novels by Alaa al-Aswany and Dima Wannous and her translation of Moroccan […] Read more
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Alice Guthrie
Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, researcher, and curator specialising in contemporary Arabic writing. Her translation of Gazan writer Atef Abu Saif’s story “The Lottery” won her the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize 2019. Her translation of the complete short […] Read more
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Katharine Halls
Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed and her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The […] Read more
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Sandra Hetzl
Sandra Hetzl translates, writes and curates projects with afocus on contemporary Arabic literature. She hastranslated collections of short stories, poems and nonfiction books by Rasha Abbas, Kadhem Khanjar, ArefHamza, Bushra al-Maktari, Aboud Saeed and Raif Badawiand her translations have been included […] Read more
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Iman Humaydan
Born in Lebanon, Iman Humaydan lives between Paris and Beirut. A novelist, journalist, and academic, she is the co-founder and current President of PEN Lebanon, and a board member of PEN International. She has published four novels. Read more
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Richard Jacquemond
Richard Jacquemond is an Associate Professor of Arabic, Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Aix-Marseille and researcher at the Institute of Research and Studies on Arab and Muslim Worlds (Iremam, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence), where he is […] Read more
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Mona Kareem
Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her poetry has been translated into nine languages, and appeared (in English) in: POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. She is a recipient of […] Read more
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Persa Koumoutsi
Persa Koumoutsi is a writer, literary translator, and essayist and has translated from Arabic 14 novels by Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz as well as many works by other distinguished Egyptian and Arab writers and poets. Her bibliography also includes the […] Read more
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Xavier Luffin
Xavier Luffin teaches Arabic at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research focuses on Sudanese Literature, and more widely on Arabic Literature in Africa. He is also a literary translator from Arabic into French. Some of the authors he has […] Read more
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Nisrine Mbarki
Nisrine Mbarki she/her, (1977) is an Amsterdam based multilingual versatile writer, poet, curator and literary translator. As a curator of literary programmes she works for different international literary festivals and is a member of several literary juries in the Netherlands. Her […] Read more
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Sampsa Peltonen
Sampsa Peltonen, works as an audio-visual translator of documentaries by day, and a literary translator by night, translating from Arabic and French into Finnish. Authors he has translated from Arabic include Hassan Blasim, Alaa Al Aswany, Rajaa Alsanea, Ahmed Khaled […] Read more
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Rania Said
Rania Said is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at University of Massachusetts in Boston. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a degree in English language and literature from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Tunis. She studies autobiographical writing in […] Read more
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Sbeih Sbeih
Sbeih Sbeih has a doctorate in sociology and is a researcher affiliated with the IREMAM. He taught at Birzeit University in Ramallah and worked on culture and performance art in Palestine. His postdoctoral work focused on the production of the […] Read more
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Nariman Youssef
Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born, London-based literary and semi-freelance translator. She holds a master’s degree in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh, manages a small translation team at the British Library, and curates translation workshops with Shadow Heroes. Literary […] Read more