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John M. Olin Library, Ginkgo Reading Room

Iman Mersal Reading

Join the International Writers Series for a reading and conversation with Egyptian writer and professor Iman Mersal, who will discuss her award-winning book Traces of Enayat (Transit Books, 2024).

Traces of Enayat is a luminous biographical detective story in which Mersal retraces the life and afterlife of a forgotten writer, Enayat al-Zayyat, though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies– from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past– a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms. With Traces of Enayat, Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought, and the Center for Literary Studies.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian writer, translator, and literary scholar. A professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, and the Nation, among others. Her selected poetry The Threshold was was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won the 2023 National Translation Award. Mersal received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for Traces of Enayat, as well as James Tait Black Prize, and The Ibn Khaldoun-Senghor Award. She is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.

Mona Kareem is the author of four poetry collections, including I Will Not Fold These Maps (Worlds Poets’ series, 2023). She is an assistant professor of Arabic Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems and essays have appeared in POETRY, The Yale Review, Freeman’s, LitHub, The Offing, The Common, Guernica, Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, Poetry London, among others. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’sInstructions Within, Ra’ad Abdul Qadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread, and an Arabic translation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.