Projects
The Centre for Arabic Geographical Literature — Irtiyad al-Afaq
When Nouri al-Jarrah speaks about the Centre for Arabic Geographical Literature, he tends to describe it not as an institution but as a rescue mission. The vast body of writing that Arab travellers produced over more than a thousand years — the diaries of pilgrims and merchants,…
The Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature
Every literary prize makes an argument about what deserves to be remembered. The Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature makes one of the most unusual arguments in the Arab literary world: that the genre most Arabs think of as a curiosity of the classical past — the traveller's a…
The Syrian Writers Association
In the autumn of 2012, nine months into a war that was already scattering Syria's writers across the earth, a group of them did something that might seem, at first, out of proportion to the catastrophe unfolding around them: they founded an association. Bombs were falling and cit…