Marilyn Booth is an author, scholar and translator of Arabic literature.[1]
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Booth graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1978, and was the first female winner of the Wendell Scholarship. She obtained a D.Phil. in Arabic literature and Middle Eastern history from St Antony's College, Oxford in 1985. She received a Marshall Fellowship for her doctoral studies at Oxford.[2] She has taught at Brown University, American University in Cairo, and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at UIUC. She currently holds the Iraq Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Booth has written two books (including one on the Egyptian nationalist poet Bayram al-Tunisi) as well as numerous scholarly papers and book chapters. She has also translated several works of Arabic literature into English. Her work has appeared in Banipal and Words Without Borders. She is a past winner of the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award and runner-up for the Banipal Prize. She also served as a judge for the Banipal Prize in 2008 and 2009.
Booth was the original translator of Rajaa Alsanea's bestseller Girls of Riyadh. However, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in September 2007, she asserted that the author Alsanea and the publishers Penguin had interfered with her initial translation, resulting in a final version that was "inferior and infelicitous".[3] Booth also wrote about this incident in a scholarly article titled "Translator v. author" published in a 2008 issue of Translation Studies.[4]