Iman Mersal


Iman Mersal is an Egyptian writer, poet, academic and translator. Her books include The Threshold and Traces of Enayat.
𝕏 Imanmersal

Biography

Iman Mersal graduated from Mansoura University, and received her MA and PhD from Cairo University. She co-founded Bint al-Ard , which she co-edited from 1986 to 1992. She immigrated to Boston, in 1998, and then to Edmonton, Alberta with her family in 1999. Since 2024 Mersal serves as Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta.
Mersal's work Traces of Enayat won the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, making her the first woman to win its Literature category. The book also won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and was shortlisted for the 2024 The National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. The book was also second selected by Le Prix Jan Michalski de littérature. Her poetry collection, The Threshold, won the 2023 Canadian National Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award.
Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The American Poetry Review,''Parnassus,The New York Review of Books, and Paris Review. She has read at numerous poetry festivals around the world, including the London Poetry Parnassus, billed as the biggest gathering of poets in world history, where she represented Egypt.
Selected poems from Mersal's oeuvre have been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Hindi, and Hebrew. These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal's work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa, was published by Sheep Meadow Press, New York in 2008.
One of her poems was selected for inclusion in the volume Fifty Greatest Love Poems. Another concludes a chronological anthology featuring 38 Arab poets spanning 15 centuries, from Imru' al-Qays to Mahmoud Darwish.
In her book How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts'', Iman Mersal "navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child." The book was first published in Arabic by Kayfa ta and Mophradat in 2016, and the English edition was published in 2018 by Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press. A new edition was published in 2025 by Transit Books.

Personal life

She married ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf in 1997. Together, they have two children; Mourad, born in 1999 and Joseph, born two years later. Mourad is a recent graduate of Yale in cognitive science.

Works

  • 2019. Fi Athar Enayat al-Zayyat . Cairo: Al Kotob Khan.
  • 2016. Kayfa talta'em: 'an al umuma wa ashbahuha . Cairo: Kayfa ta, Brussels: Mophradat.
  • 2013. Hatta atakhalla `an fikrat al-buyut Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, Beirut: Dar al-Tanwir.
  • 2006. Jughrafiya Badila . Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat.
  • 2004. Mamarr mu'tim yasluh lita'allum al-raqs , second edition, Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat.
  • 1997. al-Mashy Atwal Waqt Mumkin . Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat.
  • 1995. Mamarr mu'tim yasluh lita'allum al-raqs , first edition. Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat.
  • 1990. Ittisafat . Cairo: Dar al-Ghad.

Translation to Arabic

  • 2024. قراءة غير مُلزمة Qira’a Ghayr Mulzima.. Forthcoming from Kotob Khan, November 2024, Cairo.
  • 2016. ذبابة في الحساء. , Charles Simic, Iman Mersal, translator. Cairo: El-Kotob Khan.
  • 2011. بيرة في نادي البلياردو Bira fi Nadi al-Bilyardu. , Waguih Ghali, Iman Mersal, co-translator. Cairo: Dar el- Shrouk.

Works in English

  • 2025: Motherhood and its Ghosts. trans. Robin Moger. Transit Books.
  • 2024: Traces of Enayat. trans. Robin Moger. Transit Books.
  • 2023: Traces of Enayat. Tran. Robin Moger. And Other Stories. ASIN : B0BSSL2FVB
  • 2022: The Threshold: Poems. trans. Robyn Creswell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • 2019: Contributor to A New Divan: Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West
  • 2018. How to Mend: Motherhood and its ghosts. Cairo: Kayfa ta, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Translated by Robin Moger.
  • 2008. These are not oranges, my love: selected poems, Sheep Meadow Press,

Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 2023
Sheikh Zayed Book Award, 2021 for Traces of Enayat. The book was also a finalist for the 2024 The National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize.
Her book The Threshold was a finalist for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award.
She was elected for a 2024–2025 Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship at the New York Public Library
2021 Titulaire de la Chaire Albert Camus, The Aix-Marseille Institute for Advanced Studies.
2017 – 2018 Fellow, Canada Council for the Arts - Writers Creative Writing Program, September 2017 - June 2018.
2012 – 2013 Scholar, The Berlin Forum Transregionale Studien - Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe in collaboration with the Free University of Berlin.