The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature kicks off at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City Hotel today and continues until January 27.
With the participation of an elite group of writers and creators from around the world, the festival includes a program rich in inspiring stories, rich dialogues, and interactive activities.
The festival opens the doors to a deep human discussion about the nature of stories, as the festival hosts 5 of the most prominent Arab novelists, including the Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat, who is known for her unique ability to write from the “edge,” where she monitors characters in their moments of great brokenness and forced beginnings far from their homelands. For Hoda Barakat, writing is an attempt to restore an identity torn apart by alienation. In her work, “Hind, or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” she reflects on the transformations of the soul, beauty, and time.
The festival hosts the Kuwaiti novelist Saud Al-Sanousi, who examines the roots of Gulf identity and its historical transformations. Al-Sanousi does not write about the past as merely a past time, but rather as a living beginning that affects our present. In his epic “Travels of the City of Mud,” he delves into the philosophy of survival and extinction. His works draw their strength from the conflict between authenticity and modernity, and from the endings that give birth to new myths that reshape our awareness of place. This is what we will explore in the sessions in which Al-Sanousi participates, including “The Myth of the Salt of Truth” and “From the Ocean to the Gulf.”
The festival will also host a session by Dr. Shahla Al-Ajili, who is inspired by the great journeys and historical intersections that shape human destinies. In her novel “Hanna Diab’s Room,” she invokes the spirit of a storyteller, to express her concept of beginnings. For her, the story is the last resort against annihilation. Shahla Al-Ajili participates in a session entitled “The Taste of Homes,” where we explore thousands of stories hidden in the corners of homes, the voices that expressed, and the events stuck in memory.
The Egyptian novelist Izzat Al-Qamhawi represents a voice that contemplates “the aesthetics of living” and the details of daily life, which may escape the passing eye. Al-Qamhawi draws inspiration for his texts from architecture, art, and the contradictions of modernity, as he sees writing as a continuous construction process that knows no stability. In his book “Unlike the above,” his philosophical perception of time is revealed. At the festival, through the session “On Joys and Sorrows,” Izzat Al-Qamhawy seeks to prove that every ending in a text is in fact a window, opening the reader’s awareness to beginnings that had never occurred to him.
Human conscience
Ahmed Al Morsi has a remarkable ability to build narrative worlds that link human conscience and societal transformations, drawing inspiration for his stories from the depth of history and from difficult moments of choice. Ahmed Al Morsi focuses on the human ability to start over even while standing amidst the rubble. In his novel “A Gamble in Lady Mitsi’s Honor,” he summarizes his philosophy in confronting crises. Morsi’s presence at the festival, especially in the session “Bells of Cities: Cultural Languages of Places,” represents a voice searching for the truth in the endings of stories that are open to all possibilities.
