Bothayna Al-Essa
From 17 August to 7 September 2026

The Kuwaiti novelist and publisher Bothayna Al-Essa was born in 1982. The founder and CEO of Takween Publishing and the owner of the Takween Bookstore in Kuwait, she is also an activist who has campaigned against censorship and conservative restrictions in her native country. She is the author of a number of novels, including All That I Want to Forget (tr. Michele Henjum, Hoopoe, 2019), and Lost in Mecca (tr. Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024), a book that is banned in Kuwait today. Her novel The Book Censor’s Library (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, Restless Books, 2024; also known as The Guardian of Surfaces in the UK) tells the story of a book censor who gradually gives into the things a totalitarian society tries to forbid and deny in the human imagination. If Orwell had ventured with Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass. Translated into a number of languages, this English version was shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in the category of literature in translation.