Ergon-Verlag

Since academic reference works for modern Arab literature are rare, we decided more than 17 years ago to publish a dictionary of modern Arab writers together with USJ's research institute CEMAM. The first edition of A'lam al-adab al-arabi al-mu'asir (1996, BTS 62) contained the mainstream of Arabic literature post World War II up to 1975, listing 380 authors with their biographical background information and bibliographical material. It is unique in its genre; no other reference work on modern Arab literature embraces such a detailed scientific approach including such a large number of Arab authors. This new updated second edition mainly follows the enlarged English version of 2004 (BTS 101, Crosshatching in Global Culture), with updated bibliographies and extensive information on the authors who provided autobiographies or short texts on how they started to write. Included are the main authors writing in Arabic who shaped the modern literature of the Arab world in the second half of the 20th century. The entries consist of a short biographical note, a complete bibliography of the authors' works, and an extensive bibliography on works written about them.