The chimera of global recognition and the reality of Arab literary decay

A few years ago, an editor at a British publishing house told me of her frustration after visiting a Gulf book fair. She was struck by the complete absence of women’s voices from the longlist of an Arabic literary prize, and by the fact that every novel pitched to her was textbook historical fiction written in a classic narrative style: an omniscient narrator, a strict chronological timeline, and a neatly resolved plot.

This was to say nothing, of course, of the reactionary ideas that many Arab writers wear as a badge of honor, such as misogyny, sectarianism, and racism. And then there was the sheer cowardice of the Arab author, whose fear of approaching the long-codified triangle of sex, religion, and politics routinely seeps into their fiction.

I recalled this conversation while reading an article by Ammar Ali Hassan on Al Manassa titled “Translating the Arabic novel: Distorting our literature, diminishing our voice.” Reading it left me with three observations and one addendum, all intersecting with his core thesis: that efforts to translate Arabic literature present a distorted and wretched image of our societies. His premise, however, is based on observations that largely belong to the publishing and translation landscape of the 19th and 20th centuries, realities completely bypassed by the economic and cultural shifts of the last two decades.

But before wading in, a disclosure: I am an Egyptian author who writes in both Arabic and English. My work has appeared in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, alongside magazines such as The Believer and The Dial. I also have a novel in English forthcoming. I am in my early 40s, and writing and associated creative industries have been my only source of income. Through and because of this writing, I have lived in Egypt, Germany, and eventually Las Vegas, Nevada, where I have been based for the past seven years.

I have worked in publishing across Egypt, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, and I currently teach creative writing at the University of Nevada, where I earned my MFA. Alongside a few colleagues, I co-run a cultural consultancy that handles translation and publishing rights, literary tours, and media campaigns for authors in Europe and North America. What follows is a combination of economic facts and professional experience accumulated through work with publishing institutions in both the Arab world and the West. 

Global publishing fiefdoms

When Arab writers talk about translation and the “gaze of the Other,” they almost always mean translation into English. I have yet to meet an Arab writer complaining about the scarcity of Arabic literature translated into Chinese, for instance. The “Other” in the eyes of the Arab intellectual is the “Westerner,” with their colonial past and suffocating political and military hegemony over our very breaths and souls. In that West, the publishing world is divided into three tiers. At the apex sit the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.

Together, these five giants control 80% of the English-language book market, generating annual sales of over $12 billion in North America alone. According to a report by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), total revenue for the US publishing industry reached approximately $32.5 billion in 2024, spanning books, educational materials, and both print and digital sales. Audiobook sales alone exceeded $2 billion.

Penguin Random House alone controls 25% to 30% of market sales, meaning that a quarter of all book sales in North America flow to a single German family: the Mohns, who own Bertelsmann, which in turn owns Penguin Random House. Another German family, the Holtzbrincks, owns Macmillan. Both families dominate the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and sponsor the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Jerusalem International Book Fair.

Both families also share a Nazi past; having accumulated the wealth that now allows them to dominate global publishing through active collaboration with the Party during its rise and reign. Today, naturally, they staunchly support Israel. Bertelsmann issued a statement of solidarity after October 7, and both conglomerates pressured the Frankfurt Book Fair to cancel the award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli. Unsurprisingly, both houses invest millions in Israel, particularly in the espionage and surveillance technology sectors.

Despite the billions these publishers rake in annually, they do not invest in publishing translated works, least of all Arabic literature, the vast majority of which is handled by independent or university presses. Most of these independent publishers operate as private, non-profit enterprises, allowing them to rely on donations and claim tax exemptions.

The most prominent and longest-established of these is Graywolf Press, founded in 1974, which is dedicated to publishing alternative literary experiments. Lately, they published the English translation of Palestinian poet Dalia Taha’s collection, “Enter World.”

There is also Archipelago Books, which focuses on translations from non-European languages and has published most of Elias Khoury’s translated novels. Additionally, there is Chicago-based Haymarket Books—an indie press I have collaborated with on multiple projects. Co-founded by the late Egyptian Marxist writer Ahmed Shawki (1960–2023), Haymarket was established in 2001 specifically to publish a book most other houses refused to touch at the time: “The Struggle for Palestine.”

We cannot expect a family that invests in Israeli surveillance systems to pay $20k to translate the works of Ghassan Kanafani

Running parallel to this world are the university presses, which publish the bulk of translated Arabic literature, such as the American University in Cairo Press. This effectively sequesters these works within classroom walls and on the margins of the broader literary and cultural scene; it is exceedingly rare to spot their books in any mainstream North American bookstore.

Every publisher, whether commercial or independent, distribute its books through distributors operating in a market controlled by major wholesale networks like Ingram Content Group or Publishers Group West. The book distributor is the invisible hand of the book market; a publisher will pitch them a manuscript before even signing a contract with the author, allowing the distributor to dictate the print run.

Furthermore, the total number of works translated into English annually in the United States accounts for no more than 3% of the book market, rarely exceeding 700 books a year—a figure I contend is lower than translations into Arabic. For instance, the Emirati Kalima project alone translates 200 titles annually.

But in the Anglo publishing world, there is no centralized government support, and the Big Five are interested only in translating sure bets, works that conform to their indolent aesthetic tastes and their political agenda. We cannot expect a family that invests more than half a billion dollars in Israeli electronic surveillance and intelligence systems while owning Random House to shell out twenty or thirty thousand dollars to translate Ghassan Kanafani. This is how power and capital operate within this market, driven by the biases of cultural fiefdoms united by a Nazi past and a Zionist present.

These are the facts. I leave the conclusions to the reader.

Literature is no longer a window for voyeurism

Yet, despite these facts and figures, the record shows that the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge in the translation and publication of Arabic literature.

A study by Fatima Alblooshi and Alaa Alasfour tracking the statistics of Arabic translations recorded 37 translated literary works before 1988, followed by 61 works after Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize up until 2001. Following the events of September 11, 2001, through 2018, that number jumped to 216 translated works. Out of these, the major publishing houses put forward no more than ten novels and books, most notably “Girls of Riyadh” and “The Yacoubian Building.” The rest were published by university and independent presses, which bring a formally experimental literary sensibility, progressive political leanings, and a readership that is educated and has its own aesthetic commitments.

One of the most critically and commercially successful Arabic translations in recent years, in both its English and French editions, is Iman Mersal’s “Traces of Enayat.” Most Arabic translations of the past two decades share its rejection of linear storytelling and its defiance of dominant narratives.

These are precisely the themes and aesthetic values these publishers seek out: the fragmented narratives in the novels of Elias Khoury or Adania Shibli, the polyphony of Jokha Alharthi, the nihilistic violence of Youssef Rakha, or the splintered chronicling of a major event as seen in Mohamed Kheir’s “Slipping,” which last year made the longlist for the US National Book Award.

Yet the most famous Egyptian writer, and the one my colleagues in American publishing and academic circles have asked about most during my seven years here, remains the late Nawal El Saadawi. No Arab writer rivals her reach or influence. Her books on feminist and gender studies and decolonial discourse are core assigned reading in most universities.

But El Saadawi remains an exception. She was more than a writer; she was an academic and professor who lectured and spoke fluently in English, engaging directly with Western and global feminist and literary movements. That gave her a presence in the Anglophone market that is very difficult to replicate.

This then is the image of Arabic literature reflected by translated works. Unlike Hassan, who suggested in his article that they project a “distorted image” of our society, I do not see it that way at all. On the contrary, I believe these translations highlight the most rebellious and progressive elements of our writing, far superior to the works celebrated by official prizes. We are no longer in the 20th century, when translation and literature served as a means of voyeurism, to peer into the world of the Other. The “Other” does not need to read a 400-page novel to form an accurate or distorted image of Egypt and Egyptians.

This “Other” already has access to Egyptian TikTok videos on how to grill kofta in your bedroom, and they can easily watch Arab series and films on any streaming platform. Literature has instead become a way to build bridges between those eccentrics who decide to abandon their phones and the clamor of the world to sit for hours reading a book. The audience for literature is a body that transcends borders and languages, bound by a shared passion for an ineffable mystery, a pleasure they can find only in a book.

In defense of editing

Hassan also objects to translators who omit, add, or edit, claiming that this distorts the translation. This stance reflects a broader neurosis in modern Arabic literature: a clerical obsession with the sacrosanct nature of the text that treats writing as a form of divine inspiration, entirely immune to revision.These ideas are reinforced by the total absence of the editor’s role, whether in Arab magazines, journals, or publishing houses. But that does not mean this dysfunction can be imposed on the global publishing market.

Editing, by cuts or additions, is a collaborative process involving an editor from the publisher, the author, and translator, who sometimes performs the editorial function due to their intimacy with the text and language. The most obvious case in point is the staggering success of Haruki Murakami, whose novels were mostly translated into English by Jay Rubin, featuring significant departures from the Japanese originals. In the English translation of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” roughly 60 pages were excised from the Japanese original.

Arabic literature is a different case: most of its translators are academics. This makes the editorial role not just useful but essential. No example makes this clearer than the translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy” by William Hutchins, a professor of philosophy and religion. No publisher showed any enthusiasm for it until it caught the eye of editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—widow of US President John F. Kennedy and later wife of billionaire Aristotle Onassis. She edited the translation with her famous pencil, and it was this revised version that was subsequently published, drawing publishers into Mahfouz’s world even before his Nobel Prize.

Recent decades have turned Arabic literature into a grotesque monstrosity. Besieged by state censorship and the sterile climate of Gulf prizes, it has drifted far from the global context, both thematically and artistically, growing ever more cowardly in handling sensitive, shared human themes, and retreating from every red line. It is mired, instead, in symbolic delusions or schoolbook historical novels in the Jurji Zaidan mold; didactic, moralistic, and formally inert. This creates a reality completely detached from the works previously translated from Arabic that achieved success.

Therefore, if Hassan is anxious about the presence of Arabic literature on the international stage, or the “image” it projects, his barbs should not be aimed at translators and independent publishing houses that struggle against scarce resources and fierce competition to unearth artistically and intellectually distinguished Arabic texts. Instead, they should be directed at the sponsors of local Arab backwardness and ignorance, at our increasingly reactionary literature, and at our writers—some of whom have styled themselves as “gods of narration”—who openly brag about their sectarianism, racism, and misogyny, and most recently, their vocal defense of the Tayyebat diet.