Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. At Oxford, she held the endowed Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professorship for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, 2015-23; at Edinburgh, she held the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2009-15. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2021). She has in recent years been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; l’Institut d’études avancées, Paris; Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture, University of Chicago; and visiting professor, l’EHESS, in addition to numerous earlier research fellowships.
Safe Corridor is the twenty-first volume of Arabic fiction that Booth has rendered into English. Other recent translations include Omani author Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger; Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s Silken Gazelles; and Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost. Her translation of Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. In addition to other novels by Alharthi and Barakat, her translations include novels by Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Alia Mamdouh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Latifa al-Zayyat, Somaya Ramadan, and others, as well as a memoir by Nawal al-Saadawi and three short story collections. Her first venture into translating nineteenth-century fiction, Alis al-Bustani’s 1891 novel Sa’iba is forthcoming with Oxford World’s Classics.