Darf Publishers announces the English publication of The Other Rooms by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra Translated by William Tamplin
Posted by Darf Publishers, September 22nd 2025
London, UK – Darf Publishers is proud to announce the release of The Other Rooms, a haunting modernist novel by the celebrated Palestinian-Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994), translated into English by William Tamplin. Originally published in Arabic in 1986 (al-Ghuraf al-ukhra), this landmark work now appears for the first time in English in a definitive translation.
Written during the Iran-Iraq War, The Other Rooms is Jabra at his most radical and experimental. Set in a surreal, unnamed city that unmistakably evokes 1980s Baghdad under authoritarian rule, the novel follows an unnamed man who is abruptly taken from an empty square into a nightmarish compound. Passed from room to room, he is confronted with shifting identities, Kafkaesque interrogations, and elusive truths. Forced to lecture on a book he never wrote, he finds himself caught between absurdity and terror, erotic encounters and alienation, until reality itself collapses.
Echoing Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett, Jabra’s visionary novel is both a profound political allegory and a modernist masterpiece of Arabic literature. It captures the suffocating atmosphere of repression, the disintegration of identity, and the collapse of collective solidarity, while insisting on the endurance of memory and art as acts of resistance.
“A modernist masterpiece… a claustrophobic and poetic vision of Arab disillusionment.”
— Bashir Abu-Manneh
“Jabra’s novel disorients, entraps, and illuminates—revealing the surreal absurdities of authoritarian life.”
— William Tamplin, Translator
About the Author
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994) was one of the Arab world’s most influential modernist writers, a novelist, poet, painter, translator, and critic. Born in Bethlehem, he studied in Jerusalem, Cambridge, and Harvard before settling in Baghdad after the Nakba of 1948. A polymath and cultural pioneer, he was instrumental in shaping modern Arabic fiction and criticism, and in introducing Western literature to Arab readers through his translations of Shakespeare, Faulkner, and others.
Jabra authored six novels, including Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960), The Ship (1970), In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), The Journals of Sarab Affan (1993), and co-authored A World Without Maps (1982) with Abdul Rahman Munif. His work remains central to understanding the trajectories of modern Arabic literature, exile, and identity.
About the Translator
William Tamplin is a literary translator and communications officer in the US Marine Corps. A graduate of Georgetown and Harvard, and a former Fulbright scholar in Jordan, Tamplin has translated Cry in a Long Night and Four Stories by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, as well as Poet of Jordan: The Political Poetry of Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya. The Other Rooms is his latest translation, bringing one of Jabra’s most experimental novels into English for the first time.
Publication Details
- Title: The Other Rooms
- Author: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
- Translator: William Tamplin
- Publisher: Darf Publishers (UK)
- Publication Date: 22 September 2025
- ISBN: 9781850773566 (Paperback) / 9781850773573 (eBook)
- Pages: 193
- Format: B-format paperback
- Price: £12.99 / $18.99
- Genre: Fiction / Psychological Fiction / Political Allegory
For review copies, interviews, or further information, please contact:
Darf Publishers LTD.
277 West End Lane, West Hampstead, London, NW6 1QS, UK
Email: ghazi@darfpublishers.co.uk | www.darfpublishers.co.uk