Nazem El Sayed

Born in Lebanon, Nazem El Sayed completed his Bachelors degree in Arab Literature from the Lebanese University. He has four published collections of prose poetry in Arabic and his work is included in several anthologies. He is the 10th of 11 siblings, born to illiterate parents in the year the Lebanese civil war broke out. Arabic linguistic tradition is an important part of Nazem’s work; as he notes, he remembers picking up shrapnel and empty bullet shells to resell, he remembers showing talent as a footballer, but mostly he remembers his family’s orally transmitted verses and the long pre-Islamic classics known as al-mu’alaqat. Nazem is one of the 39 Arab writers under 40 who were selected for the UNESCO-sponsored anthology Beirut 39. He is currently a scriptwriter and producer at Alhurra TV, an Arabic satellite television network for the Middle East based in the Washington DC area.

Westerners are more ignorant about literature from the Arab world than from other areas. It’s a world that we’re closed to, and in the last 10 to 15 years the West’s relationship with the Middle East has been uncreative, to put it mildly. So, I think we have a lot to learn. – Bill Swainson, senior editor at Bloomsbury, publisher of the anthology “Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World”