The Global Influence of the Arabian Nights
Date July, 16 2020
Location Live Webinar on Zoom
The Bookseller and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award organized a Virtual Webinar titled ‘The Global Influence of the Arabian Nights’.
The discussion unpacked the legacy of the Nights and explored its place in western literary traditions.
Spanning centuries and continents, The Arabian Nights is a monument to world literature and the ageless art of storytelling. The impact and legacy of the Nights is often underestimated, although its influence on modern literature - from Marcel Proust and James Joyce to Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood - is unmistakable.
The Webinar was chaired by The Bookseller’s Features Editor Tom Tivnan, and hosted authors Marina Warner and Richard van Leeuwen, both of whom have won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for their respective books exploring the Nights, and translator of Aladdin Yasmine Seale.
Speakers
Tom Tivnan
Tom Tivnan leads The Bookseller's in-depth coverage and special issues. Before joining The Bookseller in 2007, he worked as a bookseller for Blackwell's in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US. He is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, Harper's Bazaar and Monocle. His debut novel is The Esquimaux (Silvertail, 2017).
Richard van Leeuwen
Richard van Leeuwen has published widely on the history of the Middle East, Arabic literature, and Islam, and is also a translator of Arabic literature. His publications include Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon (1994); Waqfs and Urban Structures (1999); The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (2004); The Thousand and One Nights: space, travel, and transformation (2007); Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300-1800 (2007); The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth Century Fiction (2018), for which he won a Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2020. He is a senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Marina Warner
An award-winning novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer, who works across genres and cultures exploring myths and stories. Recent work includes Once Upon a Time (2014) and Stranger Magic (2011), for which she won a Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2013. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize, and was also Chair of the judging panel for the Man Booker International Book Prize. She is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls, and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Yasmine Seale
A writer and literary translator living in Istanbul. Essays, poetry, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared in many places including Harper’s, The TLS, Poetry Review, and Apollo. Her translation of Aladdin (2018) is out with W. W. Norton, and she is currently working on a new translation of the Thousand and One Nights for the same publisher.