Arabic Literature & Poetry
PUBLISHER PRIZE 2025 FOR GERLACH PRESS
2025-10
Gerlach Press are delighted and proud to be one of the recipients of this year's Publisher Prize awarded by the Secretary of Culture of the German Federal Government. The main criteria for the jury's decision were an innovative publishing programme, the quality of publishing work, and a particularly appealing design of the books. We would like to thank all our authors who are the very foundation of our success, and hope that this recognition will further strengthen the press. Ad multos annos!...
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Mai Yamani
From Mosul to Mecca: Laila Sulaiman Faidhi
Her Life with Ahmed Zaki Yamani in Letters and Documents
2026-02
This book about Laila Sulaiman Faidhi is more than a biography about a proud and mesmerising Arab woman, the Iraqi wife of one of the most powerful men in Saudi History. The book also gives a unique insight into Arab life and the trajectory of two countries in particular: Iraq, where Laila originated from and Saudi Arabia, the homeland of her larger-than-life husband: Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources under four Saudi monarchs and a minister in OPEC for 25 years. The book then recou...
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Pierre Loti
Constantinople and the Bosphorus
With Samuel Viaud – Translated from the French and annotated by G. Rex Smith and Jonathan M. G. Smith
2024
First English translations of Pierre Loti’s ‘Suprêmes Visions d’Orient’ and ‘Constantinople. Fin de siecle’. Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud into a Protestant family in Rochefort in Saintonge, South-West France (now Charente Maritime). He was an officer of the French Navy and a prolific author of considerable note in 19th-/early-20th-century France, publishing many novels and numerous accounts of his travels around the world. He was a member of the French Academy. Apart from his literary talents, ...
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Pierre Loti
The Holy Land: Travels Through Galilee to Damascus and Baalbek.
And the Green Mosque of Bursa
2022
First English translation of ‘La Galilée’, an account of Pierre Loti’s travels in the Holy Land from Jerusalem to Beirut, via Damascus and many other interesting places, in 1894. Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud into a Protestant family in Rochefort in Saintonge, South-West France (now Charente Maritime). He was an officer of the French Navy and a prolific author of considerable note in 19th-/early-20th-century France, publishing many novels and numerous accounts of his travels around the world. H...
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Pierre Loti
The Way to Isfahan and Passing through Muscat
An Account of a Trip to Persia and Oman in 1900
2021
From 17 April, 1900, to 6 June of that year, Pierre Loti travelled in a private capacity from Bushire on the Persian Gulf, northwards through Shiraz, Persepolis, Isfahan and Tehran, before returning via the Caspian Sea to Europe. It is the personal day-by-day account of his journey, the hardships of the mountainous terrain and the empty desert. Loti excels in his descriptions of the world around him: the sky, the mountains, the fertile plains, the deserted desert. His descriptions of the people he meets, their dress and mann...
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Mansour, Ajami
Pouring Water on Time: A Bilingual Topical Anthology of Classical Arabic Poetry
with a foreword by Sadik J. Al-Azm
2016
This bilingual anthology presents the best of Arabic classical poetry's musings over the many faceted states of the human condition, among them love, generosity, life, time, youth, beauty, ecstasy, longing, wine, death and plenty more. Mansour Ajami's selection of topical verses and poems is guided by what was deemed best in its genre by the consensus of the great classical Arab literary critics and theoreticians. „For Mansour Ajami, Arabic poetry is that Midas touch which transmutes the most common-place words, th...
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Mohammed Khalifa
Der Orient - Fiktion oder Realität? The Orient - Fiction or Reality?
A Critical Analysis of 19th Century German Travel Reports [Text in German with English Summary]
2015
Following the great expeditions of the 18th and 19th century, travel activity in general increased from the end of the 18th century onwards. In addition to European destinations, the Orient and above all Egypt now became the goal of this movement embracing travel and exoticism. This work centers on the question of the received patterns of thought and argumentation that were applied consciously or unconsciously by those travelers. By way of example, the reports of the Austrian scholar and scientist Joseph (Ritter von) Russegg...
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