Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator, editor, and wanderer. She has spent many years moving between different cultures and communities across the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, LitHub, Freeman’s, AGNI, ArabLit, The Massachussetts Review, CRAFT, World Literature Today, The Markaz Review, Social Movement Studies, Jadaliyya, Alif, Banipal, and The Common, as well as several anthologies, including Translating Dissent, The Uncanny Reader, Road Stories, and 48Kg. 

She has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from Art Omi, the Banff Center for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Mophradat Foundation, and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024.

As an Arabic-English translator, she has translated poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by writers from around the Arab World, including Adania Shibli, Nasser Rabah, Hanan al-Shaykh, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Nael El-Toukhy, and Ahmed Naji. She has also been working for many years as a copyeditor and proofreader, primarily with the New York University Press (the Library of Arabic Literature series) and the American University in Cairo Press. She specializes in editing works of Arabic literature in English translation, as well as English-language books about the Middle East. She also works as a literary reader, reviewing manuscripts for potential publication.

Then there are all her other lives: as a vegan/vegetarian cook, yoga teacher, and bodyworker. Intuitive movement, meditation, somatics, contact improvisation, yoga, and qi gong have been part of her practice for many years. After living in several megacities, she has shifted her attention to rural life over the past years: living in the Peloponnese mountains in Greece, in the Swiss Alps, on the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, on a farm in Wisconsin, and in the German countryside. She is currently based in Berlin and exploring alternative rural communities around Europe, learning more about collective living, gardening, and life on the land.

Interviews

On translating the work of Nasser Rabah in The Paris Review (2025)

On ‘revolution and aftermath, disaster as a catalyst, ways of living, mediated truth and literary truth, and lying down’: with Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty on Repatterning (2022)

On writing, translation, and revolution: with Ted Hodgkinson in Granta (2011)

Awards, Grants, and Residencies

(2025) – Runner-up for the Jules Chametzky Prize.

(2024) – Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

(2023) – Finalist for the Disquiet International Prize.

(2023) – Shortlisted for the CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award.

(2023) – Grant for non-German literature from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

(2021) – Research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

(2019) – 8-month writing fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany).

(2016) – Artist’s grant from Mophradat association (Brussels, Belgium) to support the writing of her first book.

(2015) – Memoir Writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada).

(2014) – Advanced Nonfiction Seminar at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP).

(2013) – Creative collaboration (writing and visual arts) with the winners of The Abraaj Group Art Prize. The resulting digital publication, Garden and Spring, was on display online and at Art Dubai 2014.

(2012) – Residency at Art OMI (upstate New York).

(2012) – Artist’s grant from the British Council in Cairo (Egypt).

(2011) – Won the Harvill Secker Young Translator’s Prize (Vintage Books, London).

(2011) – Crossing Border festival of literature and music in Holland and Belgium.

(2009-2010) – Finalist for the Sea of Words Euro-Mediterranean Award.