Overview

""A subtle and universal exploration of identity."" --Aida Alami, the New York Times Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age twenty-seven. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat. In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies--from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past--a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms. With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

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Poet, writer, academic and translator, Iman Mersal was born in 1966 in Egypt and emigrated to Canada in 1999. First published in Arabic in 2019, Traces of Enayat won the prestigious 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, making Mersal the first woman to win its Literature category. Her most recent poetry collection is The Threshold (FSG, 2022). Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press). Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press). Jeed Saddy is a mother of four who studied voice-over and improv in San Francisco and now resides in the Los Angeles area.

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