Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar. Currently Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, The Nation, and American Poetry Review, among others. These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal’s work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa, was published in 2008 (Sheep Meadow Press), and The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022.

Her recent publications include Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha, 2017, translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts, and published by Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press (Berlin) in 2018. Mersal is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for her creative nonfiction work Fi Athar Enayat Al-Zayyat (Traces of Enayat al-Zayyat), published in 2019 by Kotob Khan (Cairo). Robin Moger’s translation, Traces of Enayat, is forthcoming from And Other Stories, UK, August 2023.