作品情報

忘却された作家の痕跡をたどり、記憶と歴史の空白を埋めていく。

エナヤト・アル＝ザイヤトの短い生涯を手がかりに、女性の経験が文学史からこぼれ落ちる構造そのものを問い直す。調査の過程そのものが物語化される、きわめて知的で親密な一冊として紹介されている。

書籍情報

出版社

Proquest Black Box B&t

発売日

1990-01-01

ページ数

236ページ

言語

英語

サイズ

12.7 x 2.54 x 19.69 cm

ISBN-13

9781913505721

ISBN-10

1913505723

価格

3009 JPY

カテゴリ

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suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love and Silence , her only novel, languishes unpublished.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).

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