The Poetry Project

Iman Mersal

In this black and white portrait, Iman Mersal wears a black turtle neck and looks to the side, the background out of focus
© Hamdy Reda

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, literary scholar, and Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, The Nation, and American Poetry Review, among others. These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal’s work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa was published in 2008, and The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022. Her most recent publications include Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha, 2017, translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018. Mersal is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for her creative nonfiction work Fi athar Enayat Al-Zayyat (Traces of Enayat al-Zayyat), published in 2019.