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From Coffeehouse to Internet: Arabic Literature in Transition

Date: October 21 - November 21, 2022, 19:00 - 20:00
Location: Hybrid

From Coffeehouse to Internet: Arabic Literature in Transition“ event was held at buchmesse, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, in collaboration with Litprom, hosting Maisoon Saqer, recipient of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2022 Literature Award.

In 2022, for the first time, one of the Arab world’s most valuable literary prizes has gone to a female author from the United Arab Emirates: The poet Maisoon Saqr has been awarded Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award (worth approximately 200,000 US dollars) in the literature category for her work “Café Riche: An Eye on Egypt” about Cairo’s coffeehouse culture, as exemplified by the famous Café Riche, where Cairo’s literati have been coming and going for over a century. 

Maisoon Saqr introdued her book on 21st October and discussed, with translator Samir Grees and Islamic scholar Sonja Hegasy, the challenges and changes facing Arabic literature today: the cultural shift away from the former centres of Cairo, Damascus and Beirut and to the Gulf, the tension between literature and politics and the role of social media versus the old coffeehouse culture.

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Speakers
Maisoon Saqer

Maisoon Saqer

SZBA 2022 Literature Winner
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Speakers
Dr. Sonja Hegasy

Dr. Sonja Hegasy

Dr. Sonja Hegasy is Deputy Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. She studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo and the Universities of Witten/Herdecke and Bochum. She graduated from Columbia University in 1990 with a thesis on Violent Narratives - Narrative Violence. Her dissertation at FU Berlin on State, Public and Civil Society in Morocco was published in 1996. Her research interests include modern Arab thought, social mobilisation, cultural history of modernity and memory politics in post-conflict societies. In 2019-2021, she held the professorship of Postcolonial Studies at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. Sonja Hegasy holds numerous honorary positions on academic advisory councils, including the Trajectories of Change program at the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and the Maghreb Studies Center of Arizona State University. From 2009 to 2016 she was Chair of the Science & Current Affairs Advisory Board of the Goethe-Institut in Munich.
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Speakers
Samir Grees

Samir Grees

Born in Cairo in 1962. Studied German literature and translation in Cairo and Mainz. He works as a translator and regularly writes feuilleton articles for several newspapers and magazines in the Arab world. As a literary translator he has translated 35 works of contemporary German literature into Arabic, including: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, Montauk and Stiller by Max Frisch, Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard, Don Juan by Peter Handke and The Capital by Robert Menasse. He wrote the only book in Arabic about the work of Günter Grass (Cairo 2016). He has received several awards for his literary translations, including the King Abdulla International Translation Prize (2022), the Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding (2018) and the German-Arabic Translation Prize of the Goethe Institute (2014).
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Moderator
Stefan Weidner

Stefan Weidner

Stefan Weidner is a renowned German writer, translator, and literary critic, with a specialization in Arabic literature. In September 2019 his collection of critical essays, 1,001 Books, will be published by Edition Converso, Germany. Weidner will speak about this project, which situates Arabic literature in the context of world literature today, shedding new light onto it from the perspective of postcolonial theory on one hand and the interested Western readership on the other.

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