Marrakech is a city of narration, and Banipal 48 presents enthralling voices from the "kingdom of the improbable, one where reality is creatively rewritten", as Juan Goytisolo describes the city in his introduction to Marrakech: Open Secrets, the first text of the feature. We invite readers to partake in many sublime moments of the real and seemingly unreal through the writings of poets and authors from Marrakech: Yassin Adnan and Saad Sarhan, whose recent book Marrakech, Open Secrets, has been translated especially for this issue; the painter novelist Mahi Binebine, who never fails to captivate, and his new novel The Lord will reward you; Abu Youssef Taha brings a couple of black tales with a twist; Rajae Benchemsi writes of Bahia, the henna painter, and describes Marrakech as "a cosmic uterus"; Mohamed Nedali's fascinating debut novel Prime Cuts: An Apprentice Butcher's Life & Loves will at last be published in English; Anis Arafai gives readers three alternative short stories while Taha Adnan presents three scenarios on the lure of the East and "the winds of Westernization".
We invite you enjoy this singular literary celebration of Morocco's Red City lying at the foot of the Atlas mountains and join us at the launch on 12 November.
Banipal 48 also includes works by two more Moroccan authors, poets making waves – the well-known Mubarak Wassat, and newcomer Karima Nadir, writing about the coastal city of Casablanca.
The Literary Influences essay by Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin admirably complements Narrating Marrakech. She explains how she was lured by her grandmother's storytelling to train her imagination "to swim in the trackless spaces of fantasy" and that she searched hard to find books to read "that did not recognize boundaries between reality and the imagination". A second Egyptian author is Ezzat El-Kamhawi, with an excerpt from his award-winning novel The House of El-Deeb, to be published in translation by AUC Press in December. Also, two Iraqi novelists – Duna Ghali, settled in Denmark and writing in Arabic, in this excerpt, set in Baghdad 2006, of a family that becomes unhinged, disintegrating through being victims of war trauma, and Pius Alibek from Barcelona, writing in Catalan, this excerpt from his novel Nomad Roots recalling an Iraqi soldier's struggle to exist in the southern desert.
We are proud to collaborate with the Berlin International Literature Festival, which for each of its 13 years to date has opened up more and more the essential world of reading for children and young people, and through literary translation, each year gives us more and more "Literature of the World". In Banipal 48 we run a special feature on this year's guests, who include J M Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, the latter wowing his audience by saluting literary translation as "a miracle", as "the most unsung art in literature", and Arab authors, whose participation is now a regular feature of the festival.
Samuel Shimon was born into a poor Assyrian family in Iraq in 1956. He left his country in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, travelling via Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. He began writing autobiographical short stories in 1979, which were published in Arab newspapers, and poetry in 1985. In Paris his small press, Editions Gilgamesh, published a number of volumes of poetry and fiction by Arab authors including two collections of his own, Old Boy and Rain of my Mother’s Letters. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since, working as a journalist. His passion for literature led him in 1998 to co-found Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation, which became internationally renowned. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Spanish edition of Banipal magazine, which he set up in 2020. A profile in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2003 described him as “the Initiator” and “a tireless missionary for literary matters”. In 2005 his autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris was published in Arabic, with a limited edition in English translation published the same year. A continuing best-seller in Arabic, described as “a manifesto of tolerance”, it is published in Moroccan, Lebanese and Egyptian editions. In 2002, he founded and edited the hugely popular Arabic literary website www.kikah.com for a number of years, then, in 2013 started Kikah Arabic magazine for international literature (both closed due to lack of funding). He also edited A Crack in the Wall (2000), poems by sixty Arab poets from the last two decades of the 20th Century, was editor of Beirut39: New Writing from the Arab World (2010), and the short story collection Baghdad Noir (2018).
