Reading List
Mathias Énard
French Novelist and Translator
Mathias Énard is a French writer and translator, born in 1972 and raised in Poitou. He studied Arabic and Persian at INALCO in Paris and spent two years in Syria during his military service. He later lived in Barcelona, Rome and Berlin. His novels include Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2015 and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize in Charlotte Mandell’s translation. From 2020 to 2025 he hosted a literary programme on France Culture. His picks here are four works from Persian and Arabic literature: The Blind Owl, Season of Migration to the North, Leg over Leg and The Arabian Nights.
The Arabian Nights
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
by Richard Francis Burton · Classics
“If Scheherazade stops telling her tale, she dies, executed by the Sultan. Literature should be like this: vital.” — via Interview, June 2017
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih · 2003 · Classics
“Subtle, dark and deeply ironic. It describes very well both rural life in Sudan in the 1960s and the relationships between Orient and Occident in the same period.” — via Interview, June 2017
Leg over Leg
Volumes One and Two
by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq · 2015 · Classics
“It’s ironic, clever, always funny, it’s unique. Such a book teaches you that everything is possible if you are totally free, if you can free your mind from clichés and existing images of what a novel should be.” — via Interview, June 2017
The Blind Owl
by Sadegh Hedayat · 2010 · Classics
“Its originality comes precisely from its narrator. We don’t know his name, but he’s telling us about himself, his intoxication, his cruel love story.” — via Interview, June 2017
