Ismi Zayzafouneاسمي زيزفون

Longlisted for the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arab Booker), «My Name Is Zayzafoune» by Syrian writer Sausan Jamil Hasan.

The novel explores Arab moral double standards which make the individual, women in particular, wear a false face and live as spectators of their own lives rather than autonomous players in them. The two names of the heroine of the novel (Jahida/Zayzafoune) serve to highlight these double standards. After a watershed moment in her life when she faints, at the age of sixty Zayzafoune realises that life can be imagined in a way entirely different to how she has lived it all these years. This moment, in Latakia, Syria, on a Summer’s day in 2019, marks one of two parallel time strands in the novel, which continues into the early months of 2020. The second timeline consists of memories of the past. The novel reflects deeply on the self: In what ways do people hate themselves? How can they hold on to life and love it, and what reason can they find to do that? - (Arabicfiction.org)

Sausan Jamil Hasan is a Syrian novelist and doctor, born in Damascus, Syria, in 1957, currently living in Berlin. She studied Medicine at Tishreen University in Latakia, Syria, and trained in hospitals in Abu Dhabi in the early 1980s, before practicing medicine in Latakia. In 2013, she resigned from her job in order to dedicate herself to writing fiction. She has published six novels, including Silk of the Darkness (2008), A Thousand Nights in a Night (2010) and My Name is Zayzafoune (2022). In 2020, she was the only Arabic author to be awarded a writers’ residency for those writing in languages other than German by the German Ministry of Culture. For many years, she has been a regular contributor to numerous Arabic newspapers, websites and journals.