Morocco hosted the 23rd Annual Casablanca International Book Fair, featuring over 350 live exhibitors and spanning a ten-day period. Any book fan would be lost for hours among the maze of stands and rows upon rows of bookshelves.
Education systems, and the literary works they prioritized, are an excellent inroad to outlining how literary forms and cultures responded to colonialism
Javed Majeed joined us for an informative and enjoyable reading group where we discussed his work on the Linguistic Survey of India and its superintendent, George Grierson.
What happens when a text from 17th century India passes through a double translation over the next two centuries? Qurratulain Hyder's translation of Hasan Shah's The Nautch Girl reveals some of the changes that occur when texts move across time and space.
Most Mauritanian fiction seems almost obsessively ethnographic but Moussa Ould Ibno breaks away from this trend and uses Science Fiction to comment on ethical questions of reproductive technology and love.
The Arch and the Butterfly represents a fine example of the maturity of the contemporary Moroccan novel, both in its aesthetics and its politics. It is a beautifully written novel that was recognised for the mastery of its craft in 2011 when it was awarded the International Arabic Booker Prize.
