Wiam El-Tamami
Wiam El-Tamami writes, translates, edits, cooks, and wanders. She’s been nomadic for the past nineteen years, spending time in many places across the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. Her writing and translation work has been published in Granta, Freeman’s, Social Movement Studies, Jadaliyya, Banipal, Ploughshares Solos and CRAFT (forthcoming), as well as several anthologies, including Translating Dissent, The Uncanny Reader, and Road Stories. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 DISQUIET Prize. She has just finished her first book of literary nonfiction, is currently exploring life in alternative rural communities around Europe, and is sometimes based in Berlin.
Wiam El-Tamami on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Things I Didn’t Know
Wiam El-Tamami
‘When people would ask me what I was doing in Istanbul, I would explain that I’m a freelance writer and translator, and I move a lot. I move intuitively, I would say: places call to me.’
Essays & Memoir | Issue 132
Cairo: September 2014
Wiam El-Tamami
‘Over the past few months, the government has been ad-libbing the time.’
Essays & Memoir | Issue 132
This July
Wiam El-Tamami
‘It felt as though time would fall off a cliff on Sunday. We jokingly called it The End of the World.’
Essays & Memoir | Issue 132
Revolution Revived: Egyptian Diary
Wiam El-Tamami
‘This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist.’
In Conversation | Issue 132
Wiam El-Tamami | Interview
Wiam El-Tamami & Ted Hodgkinson
‘So you see, translators tread a tricky tightrope between capturing the full implications of the Arabic while creating an English text that flows smoothly and doesn’t sound overwrought, dated, or downright melodramatic.’
Fiction | Issue 132
Gothic Night
Mansoura Ez Eldin
‘He wrote: they called it the city of eternal sun. Its sun set only after the last inhabitant slept, and rose before the first got up. They were all deprived of the night. They were not even aware of its existence.’
