Picture Credit: Unsplash
The Writer and the Café, Lucy Writers’ Platform, February 2022
“The café is both an island and a window to the world. It’s the right distance from life … so you can switch between writing-in-solitude mode and people-watching mode.”
Picture Credit: PEN Transmissions
Translating Place and Places of Translation, July 2021
“There are places that aren’t on Google Maps – side streets in Jakarta, for instance, that aren’t named on Google Maps. Not everything is under surveillance. These are spaces of community knowledge.”
Picture Credit: Unsplash
Lull: translating Silence, Poetry Birmingham, May 2021
“Translation is an act of the body and the bones, not a scrambling and unscrambling of fragments in the head.”
Picture Credit: Unsplash
Translation as Homecoming, Lucy Writers Platform, December 2020
What is our own language then? Can a language belong to us even if we have never lived where it is spoken?
Picture Credit: UrduPoint
Portraits in Verse, The News on Sunday, June 2020
While these portraits bear the stamp of their lived time and age, they are not period pieces. They tingle with a humanity that is universal and timeless.
Picture Credit: Perveen Shakir Trust
Revisiting Perveen Shakir, Newsline, June 2019
Why is Perveen Shakir so frequently and frustratingly remembered only as a swooning romantic?
Picture Credit: Winkleman Gallery
Artistan, Newsline, August 2014
The Central Asian republics are creating exciting new identities in their art, but the past lingers.
Picture Credit: Abdulnasser Gharem
Makkah: Constant City, Changing Face, Newsline, November 2013
Makkah will always embody this duality, the parallel but contradictory dynamics of city and symbol, of place and notion.
Picture Credit: Susie Johnson and Laylah of Blue Abbaya
Exotic Paradox: Expats Blog In Saudi Arabia, Newsline, November 2012
The most interesting news about Saudi Arabia lies beyond the pages of Arab News, in the blogs of expats married to Saudi men.
Picture Credit: Manal Al-Dowayan and Cuadro Gallery Dubai
Rising Sands, Newsline, September 2011
Perhaps the beauty of contemporary Saudi art lies in how it forces us to look a certain way and to affirm a certain facet of truth. In seeing it, we find a new way of seeing.