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. Traces of Enayat also won the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Best Biography and was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist. Author of five books of Arabic poetry, her most recent poetry collection, The Threshold, won the 2023 National Translation Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. She is also the author of Motherhood and Its Ghosts, published as part of Transit's Undelivered Lectures series, 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 Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada and a Dorothy and a Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellow at The New York Public Library.
