Translation on Adam Talib

Empty Cages

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is Fatma Qandil’s first novel and her first book available in English. The English translation was published by Hoopoe on May 27, 2025; the paperback edition is 260 pages.

The novel follows a woman looking back across childhood, family life, illness, violence, care, and loss in Cairo. Its power comes from the way private memory, domestic detail, and the long pressures of Egyptian social change gather into a searching account of survival and selfhood.

The Doves' Necklace

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Co-translated with Katharine Halls.

Winner of the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation (tied for 1st place, Arabic-to-English category).

Set in Mecca, Raja Alem’s novel begins with a woman’s body found in Abu al-Rus, the Lane of Many Heads. The investigation opens onto a many-voiced portrait of the holy city, blending mystery, social critique, surreal narration, and the lane’s own memory of lives shaped by desire, secrecy, migration, and power.

Reviews

“Alem, the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, blends surrealism and mystery in this challenging novel, which opens with the Lane of Many Heads taking on narrative duty” — Publishers Weekly (Andrew Nurnberg Associates)

Sarmada

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada tells the layered stories of a village in southern Syria, where memory, legend, desire, violence, and political dread move through generations. The novel draws on magical realism and Arabic storytelling traditions to portray a place haunted by its past and by the pressures of dictatorship and exile.

Reviews

“[…] the gem of the Arabic literature of dissent.” — The New Yorker (Full review)

“Brimful of magic, Sarmada is a book to be swallowed in rapturous gulps. It’s beautifully written and, save the rare plunge into cliché, beautifully translated by Adam Talib.” — The Independent (Interlink)

The Hashish Waiter

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Khairy Shalaby’s novel centers on Rowdy Salih, the attendant who keeps the pipes filled in Hakeem’s hash den, a hidden meeting place for Cairo intellectuals, artists, writers, and drifters. Through the den and its regulars, the novel follows comic and tragic lives from the aftermath of 1967 through the shocks of the 1970s, building a portrait of street culture, political disillusionment, and unruly survival.

Reviews

“Twelve years on from the first publication of The Hashish Waiter in Arabic, its hero Rowdy Salih can be seen as a precursor of the millions of Egyptians who finally rose up and said ‘Enough’ and ‘No’ in the 2011 revolution.” — Banipal Magazine (Full review)

Cairo Swan Song

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Cairo Swan Song, shortlisted for the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, follows Mustafa, a disillusioned former student radical making a documentary about Cairo’s street children with his American girlfriend. The novel moves through downtown Cairo’s artists, intellectuals, activists, opportunists, and outsiders, tracing a city where private desire, political defeat, and social abandonment have become almost impossible to separate.

Reviews

“[…] given the city’s political and social climate, that may be about right. Either way, it seems hard to argue with the air of desperation and resignation Said’s characters and prose evoke.” — The Independent (AUC Press)

Le Gallienne's Paraphrase and the Limits of Translation

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000