Literary programme

Nouri al-Jarrah will read some of his poems. He is a Syrian-British poet and journalist, born in Damascus in 1956. He left Syria in the early 1980s, spent formative years between Beirut and Nicosia working in the Arab diaspora press, and moved to London in 1986, where he has lived and written ever since. From London he has published over sixteen collections of poetry and founded several of the most influential Arabic literary magazines of his generation.

His verse draws on Greek and Mediterranean mythology, Arabic folktales, and legend, while reflecting on metaphysics, exile, memory, and — most urgently — the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis that followed. To read al-Jarrah is to enter a poetics in which the sea, the city, and the body of the exile become the material of a single continuous elegy.

His work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Kurmanjî, and Hebrew. He co-founded the Centre for Arabic Geographical Literature and the Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature in Abu Dhabi in 2000, and co-founded the Syrian Writers Association in 2012, of which he was elected president in 2017. In 2023 he received the Prix Max Jacob and the Primo Napoli Prize.

Moderation: Stefan Weidner