MASSACHUSETTS

The CMES Director’s Series

is pleased to present
Mai Al-Nakib
Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Graduate Program in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies, College of Arts, Kuwait University

Join Kuwaiti author Mai Al-Nakib as she discusses her collection and the experience of living and writing in the Middle East. The headlines tell of war, unrest, and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you may see another side of life in the Middle East—adolescent love, yearnings for independence, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. The loosely linked short stories in The Hidden Light of Objects carefully trace overlooked moments in the lives of those who reside in this fraught region of the world—and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

Mai Al-Nakib is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University. Her research addresses a wide range of issues linked to cultural politics in the Middle East—from Arab feminisms to the ethical question of Palestinians in Kuwait. The Hidden Light of Objects(Bloomsbury US, January 2015) won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014, the first short story collection to win in the history of the award. She is currently writing her first novel.