The Big Read Egypt-U.S.

During NECC 2009, Dalia Khalil, director of E.era, the Egyptian Association for Educational Resources, shared with me the recent success of The Big Read Egypt-U.S., a Global Cultural Initiative of the Cultural Programs Division of the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.  A partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Arts Midwest, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the initiative is designed to deepen cultural understanding and dialogue between Egyptians and Americans through the shared reading of each nation’s great literary treasures, and forms an international component to the NEA’s The Big Read.

The selected book from Egypt is The Thief and the Dogs by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. People in Egypt have their choice of three books from the U.S.: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

You can find more about The Big Read Egypt-U.S. on the U.S. Department of State website in their coverage of the announcement event and on the initiative’s page, which includes a slide show of the opening event produced by E.era.

As part of this exchange, there has also been an effort to align musical performances by exchange artists with the time period and cultural themes of the selected books.

In addition to The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz, the other international selections in The Big Read 2009-10 were The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Russian author Leo Tolstoy and Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories edited by Jorge H. Hernández.