Awards

• Short-listed for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2020

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9781913043230

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""Khatibi's style is simple, precise and beautiful. A true sculptor, he shapes his sentences and eliminates the superfluous. We face both Ivana and Salim in the first person, head on. . . . Sarajevo Firewood is an astonishing novel and Khatibi is one of the most original voices in Arabic literature today."" --Amara Lakhous, author, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio ""Saïd Khatibi's courageous and extraordinary novel, Sarajevo Firewood, is a labyrinthine journey, with Algeria at one pole, Bosnia at the other, and Slovenia serving as neutral ground in-between. As the two narrators, Salim from Algiers and Ivana from Sarajevo, discover and are exposed to shocking knowledge of their respective family origins, we are taken on a journey within the journey. Along the way, we are forced to reconsider what we think we know about liberation, nationalism, decolonization, and war, as Khatibi masterfully shifts our focus from the state to the family and the continual trauma of self-understanding in the process of becoming an individual. ""--Ammiel Alcalay, American poet

Khatibi's style is simple, precise and beautiful. A true sculptor, he shapes his sentences and eliminates the superfluous. We face both Ivana and Salim in the first person, head on. . . . Sarajevo Firewood is an astonishing novel and Khatibi is one of the most original voices in Arabic literature today. --Amara Lakhous, author, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio Said Khatibi's courageous and extraordinary novel, Sarajevo Firewood, is a labyrinthine journey, with Algeria at one pole, Bosnia at the other, and Slovenia serving as neutral ground in-between. As the two narrators, Salim from Algiers and Ivana from Sarajevo, discover and are exposed to shocking knowledge of their respective family origins, we are taken on a journey within the journey. Along the way, we are forced to reconsider what we think we know about liberation, nationalism, decolonization, and war, as Khatibi masterfully shifts our focus from the state to the family and the continual trauma of self-understanding in the process of becoming an individual. --Ammiel Alcalay, American poet

Author Information

Saïd Khatibi is a novelist, travel writer, translator and cultural journalist, born in 1984 in Bou Saada, Algeria. He writes in Arabic and French and translates between both. He has a BA in French Literature from the University of Algiers and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Sorbonne. He has three novels in Arabic: Sarajevo Firewood, which was shortlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Kitab al-Khataya (Book of Errors) Editions ANEP, 2013, and (Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle), 2016, about the real-life Swiss traveller Isabelle Eberhardt (1877−1904), for which he won the 2018 Katara Award for the Novel. His travel book about the Balkans, (The Inflamed Gardens of the East), 2015, was excerpted in Banipal 66 (2019). He lives in Slovenia. Paul Starkey is an award-winning translator and Emeritus Professor of Arabic, Durham University, UK. His most recent literary translations are Praise for the Women of the Family by Mahmoud Shukair, Fractured Destinies by Rabai Al-Madhoun, and The Shell by Mustafa Khalifa, for which he won the 2017 Hamad Translation Award. Other translations include works by Youssef Rakha (The Book of the Sultan’s Seal), Adania Shibli (We Are All Equally Far From Love), Rashid al-Daif (Dear Mr Kawabata), Edwar al-Kharrat (Stones of Bobello), Turki al-Hamad (Shumaisi), Mansoura Ez Eldin (Maryam’s Maze), Jurji Zaydan (Saladin and the Assassins) and Mahdi Issa al-Saqr (East Winds, West Winds).

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