Jalal Barjas

Jalal Barjas is a Jordanian novelist born in 1970. He is one of Jordan's most celebrated literary writers, known for fiction that engages with the lives of marginalized and overlooked people with great compassion and narrative skill. He is a significant voice in the contemporary Jordanian and wider Arab literary scene. Barjas is the author of several novels that have received recognition at the national and pan-Arab level. Notebooks of the Bookseller (Mufakkarat Bai' al-Kutub), his IPAF-winning novel of 2021, follows an itinerant book peddler traveling through Jordanian towns and villages, encountering a rich cross-section of Arab society. The novel is a meditation on literacy, culture, and the social role of books, written with warmth and understated comedy. The novel was praised for its humanistic vision, its loving portrait of books and readers, and its construction of a narrative from the fragments of encounters and stories that accumulate across a bookseller's journey. Barjas is a significant figure in Jordanian and Arab literary culture, known for fiction that celebrates the overlooked and the marginalized.