Ashraf Aboul-Yazid’s A Backyard Garden is a profoundly human, polyphonic novel set in contemporary Egypt. It weaves together the lives of individuals in the village of Kafr El-Sarai, focusing particularly on the enigmatic figure of Sayyid Kamal—a hero of the Egyptian independence movement who retreats from public life to live
In 1964, in Paris, the global Egyptian star Omar Sharif was filming his famous movie Doctor Zhivago. He was living at the time with his British actor friend Sir Tom Courtenay in the same apartment. Sharif noticed Courtenay’s deep passion for the results of the English football team Hull City, which was then playing in the second
In the restless moments of waiting in Cairo, I wandered between the ebbing of words and the depth of ideas, torn between the ache of loss and the demands of study and the future ahead.
I spoke to myself once, then again, then again—until I found solace in patience and summoned my unyielding resolve.
I remained in the company of my
In a literary evening that defied Cairo’s summer heat with breezes of creativity, Bayt Al-Hekma Publishing House hosted a seminar on Wednesday evening, July 30, 2025, to discuss the new young adult novel My Father, the Mapmaker by author Ashraf Aboul-Yazid. The event was moderated and critically explored by Dr. Mohamed Maher Bassiouni,
As the 35th anniversary of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín unfolded, its founder, Colombian poet Fernando Rendón, posed a question that echoes far beyond Colombia: What makes this poetry festival captivate so many poets and thousands of attendees each year? The answers—flowing from poets, scholars, and
