About
What does it mean to craft literature outside the Arab world while remaining deeply rooted in its histories, landscapes, and ongoing realities? Led in conversation by filmmaker and poet Hind Shoufani, writers Saleem Haddad, Nyla Matuk, and Ashraf Zaghal gather for an intimate, artist-to-artist discussion on their individual journeys as Arab creators working abroad. Moving beyond specific book titles, the authors share their personal experiences navigating international literary spaces, the push to challenge reductive framing, and how inherited memory shapes their creative form. Together, they reflect on what it takes to reclaim narrative agency and build the next era of Arab literature from the diaspora.
Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to a Palestinian-Lebanese father and an Iraqi-German mother, and educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and has advised on humanitarian and peacebuilding issues throughout West Asia and North Africa.
Nyla Matuk was born in Winnipeg and lives in Montreal. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry: Sumptuary Laws, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and Stranger.
Hind Shoufani is a Palestinian American filmmaker/writer living in New York. A Fulbright scholar and MFA graduate in Film from NYU, she was a writer in residence at the IWP at the University of Iowa.
Ashraf Zaghal is a Palestinian Canadian author who was born and raised in Jerusalem. He has published four poetry collections, and his work has been translated into English, French, and Hebrew.
