Kamal Abdel-Malek

Raised in Alexandria and educated in Montreal, Kamal Abdel-Malek is a novelist and a scholar. He has taught at Princeton and Brown universities. While at Brown University he received the prestigious Wriston Fellowship for excellence in teaching and research.

How people from different cultural backgrounds relate to one another without losing their authentic selves is what preoccupies Kamal’s scholarly and fictional work alike. America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1688 to 9/11 and Beyond (2011), examines Arab images of America: the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab Self; the seductive female; the Other that has praiseworthy and reprehensible elements, some to reject, others to appropriate.

But his passionate interest is in the historical and cultural encounters between Arabs and Jews as depicted in literature and the cinematic art. The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film (2005), was a prelude to his fictional work, Come with Me from Jerusalem, in which he tells a story of star-crossed lovers caught up in the vortex of Arab-Israeli conflict.

His second novel, The Maiden of Kerkennah, is a story of love, revenge, and the seductive power of metaphors.

He has two beautiful daughters, Amira and Layla, and now lives in Dubai teaching literature at the American University in Dubai (AUD). He is a member of the Cairo Atelier for Artists and Writers and the recipient of the AUD 2011 award for literary achievements.

External Links

http://aud.edu/About_AUD/directory.asp

http://www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/2011/05/08/the-reverse-orientalist-kamal-abdel-malek%e2%80%99s-writing-life-interview/