News

At the Cairo Book Fair

“Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads,” goes the adage. At the Cairo International Book Fair, where hundreds of publishers and thousands of readers gather each winter, everybody writes, publishes, and reads. While the sclerotic institutions of state-funded culture remain conservative forces with an outsized role in Egyptian letters, independent publishers continue to push the […]

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Malia Politzer Wins National Magazine Award!

ICWA is thrilled to announce that recent Fellow Malia Politzer’s article ‘The 21st Century Gold Rush: How the Refugee Crisis is Changing the World Economy‘ has won both a National Magazine Award and and an award from the Overseas Press Club. Politizer was a ICWA Fellow from 2013-2015 based in Spain and wrote about the […]

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At Last, Alexandria

One “is either a Cairo person—Arab, Islamic, serious, international, intellectual—or an Alexandria amateur—Levantine, cosmopolitan, devious, and capricious,” the scholar Edward Said once wrote.[1] I must be both. Over the past decade, I have had a love affair with Alexandria. Exit from the train station, and pop into a little toy taxi, a Russian-made Lada, that […]

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Jonathan Guyer in the Media

In the January issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, Fellow Jonathan Guyer examines the connections between fine and comic art in Egypt and the wider Middle East. “On the Arab Page” “That comics are often dismissed as childish gives contemporary artists more space to address politically disruptive topics,” he writes. The richly illustrated essay elaborates on […]

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