For Summer reading
Banipal 47 ­– Fiction from Kuwait

Fiction from Kuwait presents a selection of contemporary literature from the novels and short stories of 17 Kuwaiti authors. It spans the generations of literary voices, from the 1960s and the writings of Sulaiman al-Shatti, Ismail Fahd Ismail and Suleiman al-Khalifi, to works by Fatima Yousif al-Ali, Laila al-Othman, Waleed al-Rajeeb, Taleb Alrefai, Thuraya al-Baqsami and Fawziya Shuwaish al-Salem, and then to those of young authors Bothayna al-Essa, Saud al-Sanousi, Yousef Khalifa, Basima al-Enezi, Ali Hussain al-Felkawi, Hameady Hamood and Mona al-Shammari.

Almost the entire issue is devoted to the fiction literary scene in Kuwait today – with background articles on the development of both the short story and the novel. It is a vibrant scene, with many of the authors creating narratives of continuous and diverse dialogues on many levels – person to person, person to place, person to memory, memory to place. They discuss issues of expectation and surprise, loss and denial, love and marriage, humour, satire and melancholy, family traditions and relations, social mores and taboos, different cultures, environments, generations and geographies.

Among the book reviews in Banipal 47 are reviews of works by two winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction: Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal's winning novel Throwing Sparks, and The Mehlis Report by Lebanese novelist Rabee Jaber (his winning novel The Druze of Belgrade has yet to be translated).

Photo-reports of literary achievements complete the issue – the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, the Abu Dhabi and Casablanca International Book Fairs, the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction award ceremony, and the Shubbak Festival of Contemporary Arab Culture in London.

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).