Iman Mersal

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. She is the author of several books, some of which have been translated into numerous languages. In English, selections of her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, The Paris Review, The Nation, and American Poetry Review, among other publications.

Translations of Mersal’s books include The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), short-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize; Fi Athar Enayat al-Zayyat [In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat], translated into French by Richard Jacquemond as Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat (Actes Sud, 2021), winner of the Shaykh Zayed Award for Literature in 2021; Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha (Kayfa Ta and Mophradat, 2017), translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, 2018); and These Are Not Oranges, My Love, translated by Khaled Mattawa (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008).

Mersal is an associate professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta in Canada.