Awards

• Long-listed for Jan Michalski Prize 2024
• Winner of James Tait Black Prize – Biography 2024

Overview

Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize – Biography Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat’s suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat’s death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it’s as if al-Zayyat never existed. Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel’s rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat’s life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms.

Full Product Details

9781913505721

Table of Contents

Reviews

"'A brooding, atmospheric read charged with a singular magical beauty. Iman Mersal conjures up the zeitgeist of artistic Cairo after the July revolution and reveals a merciless and inflexible world behind the genteel, cultivated image.' Leila Aboulela ---- 'With the deft sensibilities of an archaeologist, the narrator of Traces of Enayat sifts through layers of history and heritage, traversing the shifting geographies of cities and memories in search of the writer Enayat Al Zayyat, the mystery at the center of this transporting book. The reader is drawn in the wake of Iman Mersal's inspired, circuitous, and relentless journey, heeding the call of the ""weeping heard on the other side of a wall.""' Fowzia Karimi ---- Praise for Iman Mersal ---- 'Undeceived, ironic, daring, Mersal's poems are animated by a singular sensibility. They deal candidly with real life - migration, dying parents, emotional entanglements - and discover general truths among the fine particulars.' Nick Laird ---- 'Long recognized throughout the Arab world and in Europe, Mersal is one of the strongest confessional (or postconfessional) poets we now have, in any language: her poems are fueled by a mordant wit, sensual vibrancy, and feminist brio.' Maureen N. McLane ---- 'Mersal's poems are many things - sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work.' Malcolm Forbes, The National"

‘A brooding, atmosphere read charged with a singular magical beauty. Iman Mersal conjures up the zeitgeist of artistic Cairo after the July revolution and reveals a merciless and inflexible world behind the genteel, cultivated image.’ Leila Aboulela ---- ‘With the deft sensibilities of an archaeologist, the narrator of Traces of Enayat sifts through layers of history and heritage, traversing the shifting geographies of cities and memories in search of the writer Enayat Al Zayyat, the mystery at the center of this transporting book. The reader is drawn in the wake of Iman Mersal’s inspired, circuitous, and relentless journey, heeding the call of the “weeping heard on the other side of a wall.”’ Fowzia Karimi ---- Praise for Iman Mersal ---- 'Undeceived, ironic, daring, Mersal's poems are animated by a singular sensibility. They deal candidly with real life - migration, dying parents, emotional entanglements - and discover general truths among the fine particulars.' Nick Laird ---- 'Long recognized throughout the Arab world and in Europe, Mersal is one of the strongest confessional (or postconfessional) poets we now have, in any language: her poems are fueled by a mordant wit, sensual vibrancy, and feminist brio.' Maureen N. McLane ---- 'Mersal's poems are many things - sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work.' Malcolm Forbes, The National

Praise for Iman Mersal ---- 'Undeceived, ironic, daring, Mersal's poems are animated by a singular sensibility. They deal candidly with real life - migration, dying parents, emotional entanglements - and discover general truths among the fine particulars.' Nick Laird ---- 'Long recognized throughout the Arab world and in Europe, Mersal is one of the strongest confessional (or postconfessional) poets we now have, in any language: her poems are fueled by a mordant wit, sensual vibrancy, and feminist brio.' Maureen N. McLane ---- 'Mersal's poems are many things - sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work.' Malcolm Forbes, The National

Author Information

Mersal the first woman to win its Literature category. Her most recent poetry collection is The Threshold, shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. She also wrote How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (2018), which weaves a new narrative of motherhood through diaries, readings and photographs. Mersal’s work has also appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. She works as an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. 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).

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