Iman Mersal

Iman Mersal is the author of four books of poems in Arabic: Ittisafat (Characterisations), 1990; Mamarr Mu‘tim Yasluh li Ta‘allum al-Raqs (A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons), 1995; al-Mashy Atwal Waqt Mumkin (Walking As Long As Possible), 1997; and Jughrafia Badila (Alternative Geography), 2006.

Mersal was born in 1966 in Mansoura, Egypt. She was an editor for the cultural and literary reviews Bint al-Ard and Adab wa Naqd in Egypt for several years before leaving for North America.

Mersal relocated to Boston, Massachussetts, USA in 1998 and from there to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where she now resides with her husband, the ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf, and their two sons. She works as assistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta. In 2005, she was the subject of Shabnam Sukhdev's Stranger in her Own Skin, a documentary film based on Mersal's poetry. Her current academic interests focus on questions of diasporic identities, which were central to her recently completed PhD thesis with Cairo University, The Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature.

Selected poems from Mersal’s ouevre have been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal's work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa, was published by Sheep Meadow, New York in 2008.