Yazbek lets the child testify, a review by Mattia Hagberg, for GP, Sweden, October 2017
How do you describe a modern war? How do you put words on the most horrendous? These questions are all over the Syrian author and journalist Samar Yazbek’s novel The Blue Pen.
Trapped in a basement in Damascus, Rima is sitting and writing and drawing. She is a forgotten girl  in Syria’s hell. Nobody knows that she is sitting there waiting to be rescued. 

The women of Syria have to fight not only the Regime, or the Islamist rebels; they have to fight the whole of a patriarchal society, including male revolutionaries. Yazbek collects their stories.

The prize for Arabic Literature was created in 2013 by the Foundation Jean-Luc Lagardère and the Arab World Institute in Paris. The 10,000 euros prize rewards one author (national of a state member of the Arab ligue) of a literary work written or translated into French. The prize will be awarded on October 18th in Paris, by former minister of culture Jack Lang during a ceremony that takes place at the Arab World Institute.

This piece is taken from Refugees Worldwide, an anthology of writing commissioned as part of a project run by the International Literature Festival Berlin. Published in The Guardian on August 22, 2017
My sister, whom I haven’t seen for more than two years, told me she was going to cross the sea in a rubber dinghy. She hung up, not wanting to hear what I thought. She merely said something profound and sentimental and entrusted her three children to my care in the event that she drowned. A few minutes later …

The Shell, by Moustafa Khalifa, is published in English by Interlink, USA (2017):
“From 1982 to 1994, Syrian topographer Khalifa was incarcerated in his country’s infamous Tadmur Military Prison, and his decision to present his experiences as fiction results in a document both haunting and bold.

In her blog lecturer Ashleen Williams explains why she has adopted Khalifa’s book in her class:
This fall I’ll be assigning No Knives in the Kitchens of this City by Khaled Khalifa for Honors 101 – “Self, Society and Identity.”
This is probably the best piece of literature I’ve had the chance to read in the last 6 or so months, and in my quest to assign my students readings from outside a western perspective, this is the obvious choice.