Women poets participate in Saudi literary evening as part of the Janadriyah cultural Festival
By Iqbal Tamimi
The literary club of Riyadh invited a number of women, poets, to participate in the evening of poetry held yesterday as part of the activities of the Janadriyah Festival, an annual national festival for heritage and culture in Saudi Arabia.
{jcomments on}The poetry event was held at the headquarters of the club and attended by both genders.
Saudi men poets participated, such as Ibrahim Alwafi, and women poets participants were Ibtisam Mutawakkil, a Yemeni poet best known for her 1998 poetry collection Shadha al-jamr (The Scent of Embers), Bilqis Melhem, she published a book of short stories entitled ‘The Widow of Ziryab…Stories from Iraq’, and a novel entitled ‘The Fire of the desired kingdoms’, and Bashayer Mohammed, author of a novel entitled ‘The Memoirs of an Estranged Teacher in Aflag’ that was banned in Saudi Arabia after it was approved by the authorities for publication in 2010. It portrays the problems and hardships that face a number of estranged female school teachers in one of the country’s isolated rural localities. The novel is based on a series of articles that were published in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan. The articles and the novel written by Bashayer Mohamed, who herself is a school teacher.
The event was chaired by novelist Mohammed Muzaini.
The poetry evening reflected diverse topics of national, social and emotional subjects, and the poems varied in their structure between classic and contemporary styles of poetry writing.
