Maia Tabet

Maia Tabet was born in 1956, and raised in Beirut, where she studied philosophy and political science at the American University in Beirut. She has worked as a journalist, editor and freelance translator. Her first full-length book translation was Little Mountain by Elias Khoury. She has lived and travelled throughout the Middle East and South Asia, and is currently based in the USA. 

She has translated works by Elias Khoury, Iman Humaydan, Abbas Beydoun, Najwa Barakat and Alawiyya Subh (Lebanon), Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Ahmed Fagih (Libya), Habib Selmi (Tunisia), Lua’ay Hamza Abbas (Iraq) and Ali Muqri (Yemen). She is co-translator of Saudi writer Abdo Khal’s Throwing Sparks, winner of the 2010 IPAF. Her work has appeared in Banipal, Fikrun wa Fann, Portal 9 and the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Her translation of White Masks by Elias Khoury was commended by the judges of the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. For more information about the judges' citation, click here.

She is one of the featured voices in Banipal 56 – Generation '56.

Contributor's Issues

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

Banipal 56 - Generation '56 (Summer 2016)

Banipal 36 - Literature in Yemen Today (2009)

Banipal 69 - 9 New Novels (Autumn/Winter 2020)

Banipal 48 - Narrating Marrakech (2013)

Banipal 40 - Libyan Fiction (2011)

Banipal 46 - 80 New Poems (2013)

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