A powerful and moving collection from six of the best contemporary Arabic authors.
 
A book censor is on the look-out for objectionable content; a daughter mourns her father during her journey to fulfill his final wishes; a desperate man runs around a city to pay off his debts. Critical of regimes and nonetheless nostalgic for their home countries, Mo(a)t is a compendium of stories from six different authors reflecting on the paradoxical demands of our day-to-day lives. Each story is written with the author's unique style, highlighting their skills in contemporary Arabic literature.
 
What binds the stories of Mo(a)t together is the fact that they are transnational. The stories in this anthology are not centered around a theme, but rather, a concept. Each author lives outside their birth country - whether by choice or exile - yet, as writers, they’ve chosen to continue to express themselves in their mother tongue, rather than in the language of their adopted countries. From South Sudan to the Western Sahara, the authors in this collection reveal the symbiotic relationship between ourselves and our communities, and the freedom to step beyond these boundaries.
 
Featuring stories by:
 
Ishraga Mustafa
Mariem Hamud
Batoul Mahjoub
Najwa Bin Shatwan
Arthur Gabriel Yak
Ahmed Isselmou
 
About the translators:
 
Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur who is passionate about bringing narratives from the African continent to wider audiences. She was co-editor of the Arabic-English portion of the award-winning Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). Her translations have been recognised by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society and the Palestine Book Awards, among others. She has run workshops introducing translation to students and adults under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes and Shubbak Festival. She has forthcoming translations from Fitzcarraldo Editions, MacLehose Press, and Restless Books. She holds an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS.
 
Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born, London-based semi-freelance translator working between Arabic and English. She holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh, part-time manages a translation team at the British Library, and runs and curates translation workshops with Shadow Heroes. Literary translations include Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter, Donia Kamal's Cigarette No. 7, contributions in Words Without Borders, The Common, Banipal magazine, and poetry anthologies Beirut39 and The Hundred Years' War.