Iman Mersal
Poet, writer, academic and translator, Iman Mersal was born in 1966 in the northern Egyptian Delta and emigrated to Canada in 1999. First published in Arabic in 2019, Traces of Enayat won the prestigious 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, making her the first woman to win its Literature category. Author of five books of Arabic poetry, her most recent poetry collection, The Threshold, won the 2023 National Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. She is also the author of How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (2018), which weaves a new narrative of motherhood through diaries, readings, and photographs. Mersal’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation, among others. She is the Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada.