About the Author

Adania Shibli, novelist, essayist, and playwright, has twice received the A.M. Qattan Foundation's Young Writer Award-Palestine. She is also the author of We Are All Equally Far From Love (Interlink). Her latest novel, Minor Detail, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

Paula Haydar is Clinical Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Arkansas. She holds a PhD degree in comparative literature and an M.F.A. degree in literary translation. She has translated numerous novels by contemporary Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian authors. Her translation of Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaihy's June Rain was selected as the highly commended runner-up of the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and also made the Daily Star's list of Top Middle East Novels of 2014. Her translations of Lebanese authors also include three novels by Elias Khoury (Gates of the City, The Journey of Little Gandhi, and The Kingdom of Strangers) and three novels by Rashid al-Daif (This Side of Innocence , Learning English, and Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?). Her translations of novels by Palestinian writers include Sahar Khalifeh's The End of Spring and Adania Shibli's Touch (Interlink). Her most recent translation is What Price Paradise by Jordanian writer Jamal Naji.

Reviews

"The most talked-about writer on the West Bank."
--Ahdaf Soueif, author of In the Eye of the Sun

"The opening of [Touch]... introduces a fragile little girl, standing alone in her landscape, in the shadow of an old, rusty water tank. She touches one of the supporting legs of the tank, and tiny, cold stains of rust stick to her palm. She stretches her hand out of the shade to warm it up in the sun, and her hand becomes sprinkled with shiny dots of shimmering gold. This is, to my mind, what Adania Shibli does with her amazingly and beguilingly simple language: making the rusty stains of reality disappear, and then making them reappear in writing as stains of gold."--Anton Shammas, author of Arabesques --Anton Shammas