Mai Al-Nakib

Photo by Rao Divi / Courtesy of the author

Mai Al-Nakib is the author of the short-story collection The Hidden Light of Objects, winner of the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014. Her fiction has been published in Ninth Letter, The First Line, and After the Pause. Her essays have appeared in World Literature Today and BLARB: Blog of the LA Review of Books, among others. An Unlasting Home, her debut novel, is forthcoming from Custom House –HarperCollins in 2022. She is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University.

An Unlasting Home by Mai Al-Nakib

July 2022
Mai Al-Nakib

Boston. Mariner Books. 2022. 400 pages. MAI AL-NAKIB’S debut novel, An Unlasting Home, circles around the complicated family legacy of her main character, Sara, an academic w...
In Ruins: Reflections beyond Kuwait

July 7, 2021 | Mai Al-Nakib

Photos by Mai Al-Nakib / Courtesy of the author Civilizations, empires, dynasties, and monarchies end, leaving behind ruins of their fabled splendor. Traces of achievements become more or less...
Pandemic Invasion: Reflections from Kuwait

April 30, 2020 | Mai Al-Nakib

Gulf Road and the Kuwait City skyline / Photo courtesy of the author Reflecting on the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the current pandemic, the author writes about wanting “to grab the fut...
Upon Learning That My Book Is Banned in Kuwait

October 10, 2018 | Mai Al-Nakib

“I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”—Samuel Beckett / Photo by paolobarzman Over the last five years, the Ministry of Information in Kuwait has banned thousands of books. Predictable reacti...
Arab Literature: Politics and Nothing But?

January 2016
Mai Al-Nakib

Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj created Unearthed (in Memoriam) (2014) out of repurposed book covers. He calls the work “a quiet gesture, an archive to remember those who have been forg...