Fakhri Saleh is a leading critic of contemporary Arabic literature. He served as the Vice President of the Arab Writers Union and acted as the Head of the Cultural Department at Ad-Dustour newspaper in Jordan.

The author of many books on Palestinian literature, the Arabic novel, poetry, and literary criticism, he has also published two books on Edward Said. He has translated Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology and Tzvetan Todorov's Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle into Arabic.

He contributes to the German daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, and Qantara.de in Germany. Some of his essays and articles about Arabic literature and culture have appeared in The Toronto Star (Canada), The London Magazine (UK), New Politics (US), Internationale Politik (Germany).

He was a member of the jury of the International Prize for Arabic fiction (2009), and the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (2006-2012), among other prizes.

His latest book Karahiyat Al-Islam, discussing the encounter of Islam in intellectual circles in America and Britain and focusing on Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington and V. S. Naipaul, appeared recently.

He was born in Jenin, on the West Bank, in 1957 and studied English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Jordan.

His contributions to Banipal magazine include an essay on Amjad Nasser's poetry (Banipal 67) and an essay on the first two novels of the Children of the Ghetto trilogy of Elias Khoury in that issue's Special Feature on the novelist, entitled "Narratives of the Nakba and Holocaust or when Palestinian Adam tries to disguise himself as a Jew". In Banipal 70 (Spring 2021) he wrote about the Jerusalem-based author Mahmoud Shukair on the occasion of a major feature on him.


Contributor's Issues

Banipal 13 - Spring 2002

Banipal 70 - Mahmoud Shukair, Writing Jerusalem (Spring 2021)

Banipal 67 - Elias Khoury, The Novelist (Spring 2020)

Banipal 70 - Mahmoud Shukair, Writing Jerusalem (Spring 2021)

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