Iman Mersal & Lauren Markham: A Conversation and Housewarming

Join us for our very first event at Transit Books HQ! Iman Mersal and Lauren Markham will discuss TRACES OF ENAYAT (tr. Robin Moger), Mersal's brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine, with a wine reception to follow. Bring your friends, your lovers, your kids.

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all.

Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies--from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past--a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. Currently professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, Canada, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for Traces of Enayat.

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Transit Books, 1250 Addison Street, Berkeley, United States