The Mariner

Taleb Alrefai salutes Kuwait’s pearl-fishing history in this fictional re-telling of that fateful day, 19 February 1979, when the country’s famous dhow shipmaster Captain Al-Najdi is lost at sea in a treacherous storm. In between fishing for seabream with two friends, the retired sea captain looks back on how the sea has been calling him since childhood, on the punishing work of pearl-divers, and how he became a captain at 14. As he recalls his voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, some with renowned Australian sailor Alan Villiers, he meditates on how the sea was abandoned when pearl-fishing ended with the discovery of synthetic pearls and oil. In a kind of revenge, howling winds and enormous black waves suddenly erupt and quickly engulf the small fishing boat.

Taleb Alrefai was born in Kuwait in 1958 and started writing short stories as an engineering student at the University of Kuwait in the mid-1970s, publishing in local newspapers. His first collection, (Live Long Abu ‘Ujjaj) came out in 1992. He worked for Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Art, and Literature, and edited their monthly arts review. His first novel was (Shadow of the Sun), about migrant Egyptian workers in Kuwait. The Arabic original of The Mariner (Al-Najdi) was longlisted for the 2018 IPAF Prize. It also has French, Turkish and Chinese editions. Russell Harris holds an MA in Oriental Studies from Balliol College, Oxford, and is an established translator of literary works from French and Arabic. He is a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, The Routledge Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography, The Oxford Companion to Food and The Encyclopaedia Islamica. He has written many articles on Middle Eastern art for various international journals and magazines. His translations include works by Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa al-Aswany and Tawfiq al-Hakim. He currently works as an editor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.