Marilyn Booth

Marilyn Louise Booth (born 24 February 1955) is an author, scholar and translator of Arabic literature.[1] Since 2015, she has been the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.[2][3]

Biography

Booth graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1978, and was the first female winner of the Wendell Scholarship. She obtained a D.Phil. in Arabic literature and Middle Eastern history from St Antony's College, Oxford in 1985. She received a Marshall Fellowship for her doctoral studies at Oxford.[4] She has taught at Brown University, American University in Cairo, and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at UIUC. She currently holds the Iraq Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Booth has written three books (including one on the Egyptian nationalist poet Bayram al-Tunisi) as well as numerous scholarly papers and book chapters. She has also translated numerous works of Arabic literature into English. Her work has appeared in Banipal and Words Without Borders. She is a past winner of the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award and runner-up for the Banipal Prize, and her translation of Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.[5] She also served as a judge for the Banipal Prize in 2008 and 2009.

Girls of Riyadh dispute

Booth was the original translator of Rajaa Alsanea's bestseller Girls of Riyadh. However, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in September 2007, she asserted that the author Alsanea and the publishers Penguin had interfered with her initial translation, resulting in a final version that was "inferior and infelicitous".[6] Booth also wrote about this incident in a scholarly article titled "Translator v. author" published in a 2008 issue of Translation Studies.[7]

Selected works

Author
  • Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
  • May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Translated into Arabic as: Shahirat al-nisa’: Adab al-tarajim wa-siyasiyyat al-naw’ fi Misr. Trans. Sahar Tawfiq. Cairo: Al-Markaz al-qawmi lil-tarjama (no. 1265), 2008.
  • Bayram al Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies. St. Antony's Middle East Monographs no. 22. Exeter: Ithaca Press, 1990.

Translator

See also

References
  1. "Profile on Banipal website". Banipal.co.uk. Retrieved 21 July 2011.
  2. "Marilyn Booth". Faculty of Oriental Studies. University of Oxford. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
  3. "Professor Marilyn Booth". Magdalen College. University of Oxford. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
  4. "Profile on Edinburgh University website". Imes.ed.ac.uk. 20 May 2010. Archived from the original on 30 July 2011. Retrieved 21 July 2011.
  5. "Man Booker International Prize 2019 shortlist announced | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com. Retrieved 8 June 2021.
  6. Booth, Marilyn. "Letters to the Editor, 'Girls of Riyadh'", The Times Literary Supplement, 2007-09-27.
  7. Booth, Marilyn (29 May 2008). "Translator v. author (2007)". Translation Studies. 1 (2): 197–211. doi:10.1080/14781700802113523.
  8. "Banipal Trust for Arab Literature - The Banipal Translation Prize - The 2021 Award". www.banipaltrust.org.uk. Retrieved 26 November 2021.
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