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 Bookstore and Publishing House in Kuwait, she is also an activist who has campaigned against censorship and conservative restrictions in her native country. Since 2014 she has given herself entirely to writing, and is the author of a number of works including the novels 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, was named one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and won the 2026 Inside Literary Prize, the first major American literary award judged exclusively by people in prison.