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Another Arab diversity: LGBT fiction by Saleem Haddad

July 05, 20227:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:00 p.m. Free entry until the venue’s capacity is reached.
In English and Spanish, with simultaneous translation.

As part of Pride Week, Casa Árabe has organized this event with Lebanese writer and filmmaker Saleem Haddad in Madrid on July 5, with the collaboration of the Editorial Egales publishing firm. He will be talking with Jimena González Gómez and Enrique Aparicio.

Two of Saleem Haddad’s recent works will be presented during the encounter: his novel Guapa and the short-subject film Marco.

Guapa narrates a day in the life of Rasa, a gay youth living in an unnamed city in a random Arab country, struggling to eke out a future for himself in the midst of an unbearable political and social scene. However, this is not just another normal day in Rasa’s life: The night before, his grandmother and only family Teta caught him in bed with another man; his best friend has gone missing; and that same night he is invited to a wedding that will change his life forever.

The New Yorker described the novel as “vivid, tortuous...sensual and biting, seeping with smoke and blood,” whereas The Guardian said that it was “an explosive debut... Guapa gives a breath of fresh air to the saying that ‘everything personal is also political.’“

The novel is being presented along with the author’s short-subject film Marco, nominated for Best British Short-subject Film at the IRIS Awards in 2019.

Omar lives a lonely life in London. He has been in the city for over a decade and spends his days working while ignoring his mother’s phone calls. One night, he picks up his phone and invites a young man who catches his eye to come over: a Spanish sex worker named Marco. However, as their night together progresses, Omar gets a lot more than he bargained for. A story of alienation and the search for intimacy in modern-day London, as well as a meditation on the pain of loss and exile, ‘Marco’ is also a universal story about the simplest, most intangible of desires: the need for human connection.

Casa Árabe has organized this event with Saleem Haddad, who will be talking with writer Jimena González Gómez and cultural journalist Enrique Aparicio. Presented by: Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Relations Coordinator.

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father. He has worked with Doctors Without Borders and other international organizations in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Egypt. His first novel, Guapa was published in 2016, receiving acclaim from the critics of the New Yorker, The Guardian and others, and he received a Stonewall Honor and Polari First Book Prize in 2017. Haddad was also selected as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2016 by Foreign Policy magazine. His writing has been supported by institutions such as Yaddo and Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. His debut as a film director has come with Marco, released in March 2019 and nominated for the 2019 Iris Award given to the “Best British Short-subject Film”

Jimena González Gómez has a bachelor’s degree in Arabic Philology from the Universidad Complutense and a PhD in Romance Philology from the University of Seville. She has been a teacher of Spanish as a Foreign Language, a university professor of Spanish Language History and a researcher at the CSIC, the University of Seville and several foreign universities (Venice, Munich, Brno). She reads and writes everything she can. She currently represents the Más Madrid political party on the Chamberí District Council (Madrid).

Enrique Aparicio is a freelance cultural journalist. He contributes to media outlets which include Yasss.es, Píkara Magazine, Cinemanía, Jenesaispop and the journal of Spain’s Academy of Film. Winner of the Alcobendas saispop Fungible Prize for Youth Short Stories in 2017 and a runner-up for the Paco Rabal Award in Film Journalism given by the AISGE in 2020, he also created the podcast ¿Puedo hablar! alongside Beatriz Cepeda. It has more than two million listeners and a live show since 2021.