Laura Casielles (Spain, 1986) is a PhD student at the Department of Arabic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research focuses on Moroccan authors writing in French and Spanish as well as on writers of the Moroccan diaspora in Spain and France. She has a degree in Journalism, another one in Philosphy and a master
"La colonisation n'appartient pas au passé, elle survit à sa propre mort en organisant une double amnésie: l'effacement des cultures colonisées et l'igonrance ou le déni de cet effacement."
Photograph of Afgoye, Somalia from 2013 (source: Wiki Commons) Mohamed A. Eno is professor and dean of African Studies at St. Clements University in Mogadishu, Somalia. His groundbreaking work uses literature, especially folk poetry, to challenge the myth of a homogenous Somalia and to expose the exclusion and
Ruixuan Li is a first year PhD student at SOAS University of London focusing on modern Somali poetry. Her research looks at the complex identities expressed by the new generation of Somali women poets through a comparative study of their poetry in Somali and English. Ignorance is the enemy of love: the novel
Researcher Melanie Bouret examines the grassroots movement for literacy in Pulaar, an African Fulani language spoken in Senegal and Mauritania (and in a vast diaspora), and shows how books circulate throughout a transregional network that is at once coordinated and spontaneous.
Tedros Abraham takes us on a journey across time and continents, comparing the way three women poets in Ancient Greece, India and Eritrea claim immortality through their poems and rebel against social norms
Kamel Kilani, a pioneer of children's literature in Arabic, translated and redacted from a remarkably catholic range of sources, as Egyptian writer Baheyya explores in this reposted blog
In an ecocritical reading of Hindi author Phaniswarnath Renu, Amul Gyawali explores the dichotomies in his writing: state-society, centre-periphery and, crucially, man-nature
Iranian poet, literary critic and translator Alireza Abiz examines Iran's 'World Book Award' and the languages, works, and topics it considers and finds the prize to be surprisingly expansive in acknowledging different sources of cultural and literary exchange in Iran
Through the annual festival celebrating the Mawlid, or the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, July Blalack explores the mingling multilingual poetry and oral histories from Assa, where Berber/ Amazigh tribes have long mixed with their Sahrawi neighbors.
