From one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine.

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it’s as if Enayat never existed at all.

Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat’s long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat’s life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies—from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past—a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

Iman Mersal's profile page

Robin Moger's profile page

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. The English translation of her collection The Threshold was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. Originally published in Arabic in 2019, Traces of Enayat was awarded the prestigious Shaykh Zayed award for literature in 2021.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Washington Square Review, Michigan Review and elsewhere.

"The prose shines and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates." —Publishers Weekly

"A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing." —Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Iman Mersal:

"Traces of Enayat [is] a creative nonfiction text that defies categorization, in which [Mersal] continues her investigation of the untold histories of women’s mental health at the intersection of middle-class morality and cultural canon-making. The archive, its gendered composition, and its silences, are for Mersal a constant point of departure and return." —Vina A. Ramadan, BOMB

"The first new poems I've liked for years . . .Unpredictable, savage, chaotic. There is something of Zbigniew Herbert in them, clever, abstract, musing stuff, but they are this year's model, an 'upgrade,' as we would say, with terrifying bleakness in place of his periodic geniality." —Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

"Mersal doesn’t offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it’s even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary . . . To read The Threshold is to be heartened by poem after poem that exhibits the whole woman—heart and mind, candor and cunning." —Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

[Mersal's poetry] is bracing, clever, and terse, but slippery too. The self is not her subject so much as an impediment that she writes around; there’s deceit, disloyalty, duplicity, misdirection . . . There is an almost joyful sense of privacy in Mersal’s poems: She obscures as much as she discloses." —Amir-Hussein Radjy, The Nation

"This selection, drawn from [Mersal's] first four books and nimbly translated from the Arabic, showcases the sweet, tough verve of her voice." —The New York Times Book Review

"Mersal's poems are many things—sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work." —Malcolm Forbes, The National

"Ravishing . . . Mersal’s poems read like short stories; they are spare but resonant, full of charming misfits, and governed by chance." —Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns