Winning the Arabic Booker prize

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

On 26 February 1974, geologist Dr Jim Bowler discovered a 42,000-year-old skeleton in New South Wales, Australia.The remains were nicknamed Mungo Man, as they were found in Lake Mungo.The discovery rewrote Australia's history, it proved Aboriginal Australians had occupied the con ...  Show more

Zadie Smith grew up in north west London and studied English at Cambridge University. After a publisher’s bidding war when she was just 21, her debut novel White Teeth became a huge critical and commercial hit on publication in 2000 and won several awards including the Orange Pri ...  Show more

Shahidha Bari looks at the voices of women emerging from new writing in novels, plays and histories. Zenobia, Mavia, and Khadijah are Arabian queens and noblewomen who feature in the new book by Emran Iqbal El-Badawi which looks at the way female rulers of Arabia were crucial in ...  Show more

How did it happen that, in the 13th century, Europe's largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes while Baghdad alone boasted of several libraries holding from 200,000 to 1,000,000 books each? In The Rise of the Arabic Book (Harvard UP, 2020), Beatrice Gruendler traces the sto ...  Show more

Harriett Gilbert talks to the Egyptian writer, Bahaa Taher an Egyptian novelist who writes in Arabic and is the winner of the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction, awarded in 2008.