The Book of Damascus launch with Zaher Omareen, Majd Abu Shawish and Odai Al-Zoubi

About the event

Join us for a celebration of storytelling, writing, and critical thinking from the Syrian Capital, in association with Liverpool Arab Arts Festival.

Damascus is a city of contradictions. Simultaneously the oldest city in the world, rich with Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic architecture, and one of the most modern and developed in the Middle East, it stands at a cross-roads between East and West, the past and the future, peace and war.The latest installment in Comma’s ‘Reading the City’ series is filled with the perspectives of ordinary Syrians we never read about in the news - be they teenage boys scheming to raise funds for a longed-for Eid picnic; impoverished girls picking through rubbish dumps hoping to find gold, or more mystical characters like the mysterious guardians who watch over the seven planet-themed gates of the old town. 

LAAF, in association with Comma Press, would like to invite you to join us for an evening of readings, translations and discussions about the challenges that Damascus has survived and what lies head for it, in these most precarious times.

The event will be chaired by Comma’s Ra Page.

About the speakers:

Odai Al-Zoubi is a Syrian short-story writer, essayist, and translator. Born in Damascus in 1981, he studied electrical engineering at Damascus University (1998-2004), followed by philosophy at Lebanese University (2003-2007). He has a PhD in Philosophy from University of East Anglia. He has published one travelogue - Moving Shadows (Khan Aljanub, Berlin, 2025), and five collections of short stories: Silence (Al-Mutawassit, 2015), Windows (Al-Mutawassit, 2017), The Book of Wisdom and Naivety (Mamdouh Adwan, 2019), Half-Smile (Mamdouh Adwan, 2022), and Shackled Hearts (Safsafa, 2024).

Zaher Omareen is a war correspondent, filmmaker, and writer whose creative work is inspired by the conflict zones in which he has worked: Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, and Iraq. He often explores the intersection of documentary and fiction, and his writing has been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in the anthologies Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations (Comma Press and Deep Vellum, 2018) and the bilingual Danish-English collection Eksil (Screaming Books, 2019), as well as in the journals Words Without Borders, Massachusetts Review, The Common, M-Dash and Trafika Europe. He co-edited the seminal Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline(Saqi Books/Dar Saqi, 2014) and is the editor of The Book of Damascus: A City in Short Fiction.

Majd Abu Shawish is a Gaza-born, Manchester-based translator, poet and political scientist. His translations from the Arabic have previous appeared in The Guardian and numerous Comma Press anthologies.