James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
Traces of Enayat
Tracing the life and death of the forgotten Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat in Cairo, Iman Mersal moves between research and recollection to fill a gap in literary history. The book blends biography, essay, and personal reflection into a quiet but persistent act of rediscovery.
Work Information
It follows the traces of a forgotten writer and closes the gap between memory and history.
Using Enayat al-Zayyat's brief life as a starting point, the book questions the structures that allow women's experience to disappear from literary history. The act of investigation itself becomes narrative, making this an intensely intellectual yet intimate work.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Proquest Black Box B&t
- Published
- 1990-01-01
- Pages
- 236 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.7 x 2.54 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781913505721
- ISBN-10
- 1913505723
- Price
- 3009 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Essays & Correspondence/Letters & Correspondence
Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize – Biography Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat’s suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence , her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat’s death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it’s as if al-Zayyat never existed. Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love and Silence in the nineties, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel’s rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love and Silence disappear from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat’s life, interviews family members and friends, reconstructs the afterlife of Enayat in the media, and tracks down the flats, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums among which Enayat divided her days. Touching on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse and divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema, this wide-ranging, unclassifiable masterpiece gives us a remarkable portrait of a woman artist striving to live on her own terms.
Mersal the first woman to win its Literature category. Her most recent poetry collection is The Threshold, shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. She also wrote How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (2018), which weaves a new narrative of motherhood through diaries, readings and photographs. Mersal’s work has also appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. She works as an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).
Reviews
-
A fascinating book
I saw a review in the Economist and pre-ordered Traces of Enayat on Kindle. Like the author I feel like Enayat is now part of my journey too. If Love and Silence is ever translated in English I’d look forward to reading it too