| "Bedouins, satellite dishes and stone mirrors" is the subtitle of a travelogue that Amjad Nasser wrote after his most recent trip to his native Jordan. With his keen gaze Nasser registers all the social, economic and infrastructural changes that have taken place in the country he left in 1977. Even the Jordanian desert, where one used to find only Bedouins and military facilities, has changed to take on a modern face: pylons, schools, American and Japanese delivery vehicles now characterize the desert just as do Bedouins with cell phones who live in tents with satellite dishes. Along with six volumes of poetry, Nasser has published two books of travel essays. They sketch the stations of his life in a mixture of reporting, fiction and autobiography. The motifs of otherness, travel and exile “under more than one sky” – the title of one of his travel books – play central roles in his writing, both in his prose and his poetry. Amjad Nasser will read from both. Amjad Nasser, born in 1955 in At-Tarra/Jordan, has lived in London since 1987, working, among other things, as the culture editor of the Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Arabi. Some of his poems have appeared in German translation in the anthologies Die Farbe der Ferne (The Colour of the Distance, 2000) and Zeichen und Zauber (Signs and Magic, 2000), as well as a number of English-language literary journals. Language: Arabic and German with translation
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