Wiam El-Tamami | Granta Magazine

Wiam El-Tamami

Wiam El-Tamami is a writer, translator and editor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Freeman’s, Social Movement Studies, Jadaliyya, Banipal, Ploughshares Solos and Craft. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet Prize.

Wiam El-Tamami on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Issue 164 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 164 padlock

Cairo Song

Wiam El-Tamami

‘I see this everywhere. The creativity, resourcefulness and incredible talent for improvisation in Egypt.’

Wiam El-Tamami on returning to Cairo.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 164
Essays & Memoir | Issue 164

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.’

Fiction | Issue 132
Fiction | Issue 132

The Mother of All Sins

Hanan al-Shaykh

‘Loving life is the mother of all sins.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 132
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
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
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
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
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.’

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