مدونة كوثر الجهمي

 For: https://arablit.org/ For June 2026, our Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals (this month, curated by Masoud Masoud) will focus on Libya’s publishing scene: publishers, prizes, festivals, and how authors make things work in an unstable living, working, reading, and publishing environment. Thus, this month, we will be particularly featuring excerpts from Libyan works and talks with Libyan writers. Today, Kawthar al-Jahmi talks about her writing and reading journeys, the role of literary prizes, submitting her novel to the publisher a day before giving birth, and developing a writing practice while working and raising children. To start off with, can you tell us a little about your journey to writing and publishing? My understanding is that you first started writing under pseudonyms in various online forums, and that you moved from more essayistic and polemical writings to fiction. What motivated your turn toward fiction? And what is the relationship in your wor...

 For: https://arablit.org/ For June 2026, our Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals (this month, curated by Masoud Masoud) will focus on Libya’s publishing scene: publishers, prizes, festivals, and how authors make things work in an unstable living, working, reading, and publishing environment. Thus, this month, we will be particularly featuring excerpts from Libyan works and talks with Libyan writers. One of our featured authors is Kawther Al-Jahmi , whose A Son of the Country revolves around Majdi and his family; his father, Rashid, is a Moroccan who fled his country after a conflict with police in 1976 and found his way to Tripoli, where he marries his boss’s disabled sister Moufida. When they have children, the issue of their children’s documentation comes to the fore, as Rashid cannot secure his own paperwork, and Libyan law doesn’t allow Libyan women who marry foreigners to pass their citizenship to their kids. To make it worse, Rashid dies, leaving Moufida—with ...

  For "words without borders"  Colonel Ali at Wadi Doum By Kawther Eljehmi Translated from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman I swallowed a whole lot of sand the afternoon we got lost in the desert. A few hours before we got caught, a passing sandstorm had blown into our faces. It had picked the worst time to hit because our scalps were already being burned by the midday sun, and if we’d been back at the base, we’d have grumbled about its timing. But we were busy running for our lives, so we couldn’t waste our breath on useless complaining. Little did I know it then, but this wouldn’t be the last time we had grit shoved down our throats. And the next time, things would be much worse. That morning, we’d hightailed it out of the Wadi Doum base. We lost the base in a battle at dawn, on March 23, 1987. The fighting had begun the day before at around five in the afternoon; it died down during the night and started up again at daybreak. Whoever managed to get away, did. But some of us fou...