For the first time this year, The White Review Poet’s Prize was open to poets based anywhere in the world. Last month we announced a shortlist of eight poets. ...
Youssef Rakha is a writer and photographer from Cairo. He has seven books in Arabic, including collections of poems, essays, and fiction, several travelogues, and one novel. His work in English has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Banipal, and The Kenyon Review, among others. A translation of his novel The Crocodiles, the first in a trilogy, is due in Autumn 2014 from Seven Stories Press.
The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched to the use of handheld...