A scholar and translator of classical and medieval Arabic literature, Yale’s Shawkat Toorawa’s area of inquiry also includes modern poetry and science fiction film and literature — a range of interests reflected in his capacious list of summer reading recommendations.
Toorawa is the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and professor of comparative literature in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; he is also the host of “The dr. T projecT,” a weekly campus gathering at which he shares “three things worth knowing.”
Shawkat Toorawa
What’s your ‘beach read’ this summer?
Shawkat Toorawa: Beach reads for me (since I’m not a sun-sand-beach person) are long books I’ve meant to read but have put off till the summer. This summer there are two. I’m re-reading “The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse” (1973), chosen by Philip Larkin, an apposite beach read as this collection is a contender for my “desert island book.” It’s in this collection that I discovered Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Jennings, Derek Walcott, and Larkin himself, among countless others. Little gives me greater joy than reading in my sixties poems I read as a ten-year old, ones that were formative in my outlook on life and literature.
The second is China Miéville’s (acclaimed) “Perdido Street Station” (2000), a phenomenal work of speculative fiction. The novel is set in a dystopian metropolis, at some time during an industrial revolution — he is liberal in his use of steampunk. It has been described as part of the new weird: the protagonist is a scientist, his girlfriend, a khepri or humanoid insect, is an artist…Miéville is a world-builder like almost no other writer.
Do you have a favorite book that you wish more people had read?
Toorawa: I’d like to mention three. Two are in unintended keeping with the genres of my beach reads: Gene Wolfe’s science fantasy/speculative fiction novel “The Shadow of the Torturer” (1980), the first volume in the Book of the New Sun series; the “Collected Poems” of the great Cornwall poet Charles Causley; Nadia Davids’ novel “An Imperfect Blessing.” Wolfe’s novel, set in the very distant sun-dimmed (medieval-like) future, is about the journey of an apprentice member of a torturer’s guild who is banished for showing mercy. Ursula Le Guin said of Wolfe, “He is our Melville.”
Causley is a Cornwall poet; when visiting Teignmouth, in Devon — where Keats had visited his dying brother, and unbeknownst to him (Keats) that he was dying himself of tuberculosis — Causley wrote, “Then I saw the crystal poet/leaning on the old sea-rail/In his breast lay death the lover/In his head the nightingale.”
Nadia Davids is a South African playwright, novelist, and short story writer. She won the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Bridling.” “An Imperfect Blessing” (2014), her debut novel set a year before the end of apartheid (1994), tells the story of South Africa through the eyes of 14-year-old Alia Dawood. I taught this novel two years ago and plan to teach it again next spring.
Is there a new book you are looking forward to picking up?
Toorawa: I first encountered contemporary Omani fiction through the splendid works of Jokha Alharthi, in particular her “Sayyidât al-Qamar” (2010, available in English as “Celestial Bodies,” 2019), and have been wanting to read more from Oman. The new book I’d like to pick up is Sherifa Al-Toubi’s “Al-Bayraq: Habûb al-Rîh” [roughly “The flag: the blowing of the wind”] (2024), a novel I learned about when it was longlisted for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the so-called ‘Arabic Booker’). Before she turned to full-time writing, Al-Toubi worked for the Royal Oman Police, the General Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the General Directorate of Prisons, and as a journalist. I am expecting this background will emerge in this novel about the Dhofar Rebellion from 1965 to 1979 against the British and the Omani Sultanate.
