Event

Join the Middle East Center as we welcome Suad Amiry, Palestinian novelist, essayist, and architect, as she discusses her new novel Mother of Strangers with Professor Huda Fakhreddine. Set in Jaffa in 1947-51, this fable-like novel is a vivid tale of young love during a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East - the beginning of the end of Palestine and a city irrevocably changed.

Suad Amiry is an acclaimed writer and an architect. She is the author of six works of nonfiction, including Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, which was awarded the Viareggio-Versilia International Prize in 2004, and Golda Slept Here, which was awarded the Nonino Risit d’Aur Prize in 2014. Amiry received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and is the founder of the RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, where she lives.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition(Brill, 2015), The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Her book of creative non-fiction titled زمن صغير تحت شمس ثانية (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is one of the editors of the Library of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Literatures.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.