Newspapers, Prizes, and Politics: The Field’s Institutions and the Global and Regional Context

Abstract

“The literary scene?—There is no such thing in Lebanon,”¹ Ramy Zein, a Lebanese novelist in his forties remarked, half-jokingly, when we first met in an empty classroom of the francophone Université Saint Joseph (USJ) at the Rue de Damas in central Beirut (int. October 2011). During the course of our conversation it turned out that he was indeed acutely aware—if vehemently critical—of literary life in his native Beirut, which he thought of as a largely mundane affair. With literary criticism largely absent, and book-signings the most important literary events, he felt it was difficult to talk about a literary scene in the proper sense of the word. The bitter sarcasm of comments such as these, which came up in many interviews and conversations with Lebanese journalists and authors, would hardly be lost on anyone with even a peripheral interest in Arabic literature. The city Zein was talking about was Beirut after all: the “printing press of the Middle East,” the haven of free speech where gathered were writers from all over the Arab world who were prosecuted in their home countries; the Beirut of Adonis and Kanafani, but also, more recently the Beirut of Elias Khoury Rashid al-Daif, Hoda Barakat, and Hanan al-Shaykh, whose novels are counted among the most innovative works in the Arabic literature of the 1980s and 1990s.