Who Will Play Salaheddin?

Rasha Abbas is a Syrian writer and journalist based in Berlin, where she is culture editor at prominent Syrian opposition media outlet Aljumhuriya.net. Her debut short story collection, Adam Hates TV [in Arabic] (al-Amana al-ʿamma li-htifaliyyat Dimashq ʿasimat al-thaqafa, 2008), was awarded a prize for emerging writers at the Damascus Capital of Arab Culture festival, and her collections The Invention of German [in Arabic] (10/11 Publishing Group, 2016) and The Gist of It [in Arabic] (Dar al-Mutawassit, 2017) have both been translated into German to critical acclaim.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir, Rotten Evidence, has been published by McSweeney's, and her translation of Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line will be published by Peirene in 2024.