Quick, how many Kuwaiti authors can you name? If you follow literary awards like the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, you may know the work of Saud Alsanousi. His novel The Bamboo Stalk won this award in 2013. But what about the works of Ismail Fahd Ismail? The award-winning short stories by Mai Al-Nakib? Or the recent novel by Layla AlAmmar?
Kuwaiti literature has a rich history and I believe it deserves much more recognition. Here, we study six authors from Kuwait. Their novels and stories are beautifully written pieces that reveal the complexities of Kuwait, the Arab world, and human life in general. Buy or borrow these works as soon as you can, you won’t be disappointed!
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Saud Alsanousi
Saud Alsanousi is most famous for his award-winning novel The Bamboo Stalk. The story follows a man of mixed parentage, the son of a Kuwaiti man and a Filipino maid. Through young Jose’s return to Kuwait at the age of eighteen, the novel explores the status and treatment of foreign laborers, and universal ideas of identity and race. If you haven’t read Alsanousi’s work before, this is an excellent place to start.
In 2015, Sawad Hussain translated Alsanousi’s subsequent novel, Mama Hissa’s Mice. It presents a dystopian Kuwait, sometime in the near-future. Sectarian violence divides the country, with protesters in the streets. When the protagonist Katkout regains consciousness after an attack, his friends and family have vanished. He begins searching, recalling his own past, and questioning the Sunni-Shia divisions that have risen around him. The novel is deftly crafted, with a complex story that explores the power and effect of religious differences, while highlighting the sights and culture of Kuwait.
Ismail Fahd Ismail
Ismail Fahd Ismail (1940-2018) was a extremely prolific and influential author. He wrote more than 20 novels, in addition to plays, short stories, and literary criticism. Despite this large repertoire, little of his work has been translated however.
Ismail’s only novel in English translation is the allegorical story The Old Woman and the River. This incredible anti-war tale focuses on the effect of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. The war has ravaged both sides of the border, leaving deserted wastelands. Along the Shatt al-Arab River, the trees and fields are dead or dying. Except one section. There, one woman has made the difference. Forced to leave her village at the onset of the war, Um Qasem returns, pledging to restore the bounty that has been lost.
Bothayna Al-Essa
Bothayna al-Essa is a powerful force in the world of Kuwaiti literature. In addition to her writing career, she runs the bookstore and publishing house Takween, and is a vocal advocate for freedom of expression. In particular, she has campaigned strongly against censorship in Kuwait, even giving a speech at Parliament about book banning. The government banned her 2015 novel Wandering Maps due to a scene of child molestation.
Her novel All That I Want to Forget (translated in 2019) tells the story of Fatima, a young woman who is passionate about poetry and hopes to study French literature. Her vision directly opposes the wishes of her older brother, however, who is strict and very conservative. We follow Fatima as she falls in love with a young poet Isam, but is married to a man she’d never met before. Her love of Isam and poetry clashes with her arranged marriage and the power of her conservative brother. Where will her life lead?
Taleb Alrefai
Taleb Alrefai is a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic, who teaches creative writing at the American University in Kuwait. His novel Scent of the Sea won the Kuwaiti State Prize for Literature, and he has twice been nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel Here made the longlist for the prize in 2016, while Al-Najdi made the list in 2018.
In 2020, Russell Harris translated Al-Najdi into English as The Mariner. This story celebrates Kuwait’s history of pearl-diving through a fictional retelling of the voyages of famed dhow captain Ali Nasser Al-Najdi. Alrefai builds his narrative around the frightening tale of the ship lost in a storm. Flashbacks highlight the early life of this dhow captain, his early experience with pearl fishing, and changes to the practice after the country’s discovery of oil and natural gas.
As Alrefai once described, “the novel was very close to my heart as it immortalizes a national hero of my country, Kuwait.”
Mai Al-Nakib
Mai Al-Nakib holds a PhD in English literature and is an associate professor at Kuwait University. She is a prolific writer, publishing academic articles, non-academic essays, and works of fiction.
Her short story collection The Hidden Light of Objects won the 2014 First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The work beautifully captures the feelings, encounters and challenges of everyday life against the backdrop of larger events like the Gulf War and 9/11. Reviewers describe the collection as daring, poetic and lyrical — stories that mix beauty with sadness and loss.
Al-Nakib will soon publish her first novel as well. The release date for An Unlasting Home is April 2022.
Layla AlAmmar
The last of our Kuwaiti authors is Layla AlAmmar, a writer and academic now pursuing her PhD in Lancaster. Her publications include a number of short stories and two novels, The Pact We Made (2019) and Silence is a Sense (2021).
Silence is a Sense is a novel about an unnamed refugee who just arrived in the UK from war-torn Syria. Fighting the trauma of her experiences, the young woman stays mute in her new city, but publishes her feelings and experiences for a local magazine under the pseudonym The Voiceless. As she hesitantly ventures out of her safe space into the community, a hate crime rocks the local mosque. The narrator must make a decision. Should she remain quiet or speak out? Reviewers described the novel as moving and courageous, a compelling and thought-provoking work.
What Next?
Start reading! Look for these books at your local library. Or, better yet, support these Kuwaiti authors by purchasing their work for yourself. Go to your neighborhood bookstore, click the links above, or visit online sites like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Powell’s.
Help me out by sharing this post with others! Kuwaiti authors are an influential force in Arab literature and are getting greater recognition, in terms of awards and positive press. Please tell your friends and colleagues about this post, talk about it on social media, and explore these authors yourself.
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