Past Events

The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion 

by Akram Musallam

translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain

published by Seagull Books, distributed by Chicago Univ Press,
with paperback and ebook widely available: 
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo124470003.html

Entered for the 2022 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, three chapters of the book were earlier published in Banipal 45 – Writers from Palestine (2012) with the title The Tale of the Scorpion that Dripped with Sweat سيرة العقرب الذي يتصبب عرقا (Dar al-Adab, 2008), translated by Charis Olszok. That issue of Banipal  https://www.banipal.co.uk/back_issues/83/issue-45/ has been out of print for a while. 

Akram Musallam was born in Talfit near Nablus in the West Bank in 1972. He graduated from the department of letters and holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Birzeit. He writes for the daily al-Ayyam and is editor of the political quarterly al-Siyasa. The original Arabic edition of The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion won the A. M. Qattan Award in 2008 and has been translated in French (Actes Sud) and Italian (Il Sirente). In 2010 Akram was a participant in the International Prize for Arabic Fiction’s workshop for young Arab writers. 

Read more about Akram Musallam here and here. 

Read about Sawad Hussain here: https://www.banipal.co.uk/contributors/1325/sawad-hussain/

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The Markaz Review writes about The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion:

“An intricately woven and multi-layered narrative, where content and form are closely interconnected in a spiraling structure... by the end of the book we are thrown right back to the beginning by the force of its spiraling form and, like the characters of the stories told by the narrator, are left in desperate search to fill that emptiness left by loss... The result is simultaneously a novel that reflects some of the collective themes of the Palestinians -- the collective loss, absence, and memory in this case -- as well as a novel that expands beyond these limits and opens up to meanings that are universal and can be related to by every reader.”

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