Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Contributor

Marilyn Booth

Contributor

Marilyn Booth

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Faculty of Oriental Studies and Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and was a research fellow at l’Institut d’Etudes Avancées, Paris, February-April 2022. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria, and is her fourth research monograph, preceded by a book history of Fawwaz’s biographical dictionary of women (Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2015). Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies Group, she edited Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (2019) and is co-editing a second volume of the group’s work. She has translated eighteen published works of fiction and memoir from Arabic, including recently Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost and Hassan Daoud’s No Road to Paradise. She was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, and her translation of Alharthi’s novel Bitter Orange Tree appears in May 2022.

Articles by Marilyn Booth

A fox standing in snow is facing the camera
Fox by Chrisbkes is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Pityriasis Rosea
By Jokha Alharthi
It’s because all we’ve been talking about these evenings are the old legends, and that’s what brought the fox here.
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
First Read—from “Celestial Bodies”
By Jokha Alharthi
Jokha Alharthi’s Man Booker International Prize–winning Celestial Bodies, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth and out this month with Catapult, follows the stories of three sisters—Mayya,…
Translated by Marilyn Booth
A bitter orange tree
Copyright © Jared Preston / CC BY-SA 3.0
Bitter Orange
By Jokha Alharthi
In this excerpt from 2019 Man Booker International winner Jokha Alharthi's novel Bitter Orange Tree, an Omani student dredges up her grandmother’s troubled past and grows entangled in the personal dilemmas of her fellow international students.
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
The Veiler of All Deeds
By Hamdi Abu Golayyel
When Abu Gamal revealed Shaykh Hasan's secret to the residents of Number 36 . . .
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Learn
A white chick.
Photo by Osman Kahraman on Unsplash.
It’s a Chick, Not a Dog
By Jar al-Nabi al-Hilw
My mother knew he was walking after her. Almost certainly she knew. Do you want me to tell you why?
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Learn
from Picture, Icon, Old Testament
By Sahar Khalifeh
The story began for me when I fled a family marriage arranged by my mother’s brother. In rebellion, I accepted a post in a forgotten village at the city’s far perimeter. But my troubled conscience,…
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Waltzing Matilda
By Najem Wali
All I have left from this story is a white Caribbean suit, a Panama hat, and a cassette tape that I’ve carried persistently in my left shirt pocket. And a pair of white shoes which, if I hadn’t…
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth