Egyptian writer Salah Maati: Syria is the homeland of creativity and is full of literature, art and true thought

Egyptian writer Salah Maati is one of the most contemporary Arab novel writers, due to his rich products in the global imagination, historical and social novels, and the many awards he won over more than thirty-five years.

Maati believes that the novel is the literature of life that relies on details, character drawing, tight dramatic construction, narrative language, and various elements of suspense, in order to make his novel alive with its events, characters and dramatic escalation.

In an interview with SANA, Maati says: “The writer should search for the line with which the novel begins, or as my teacher, the great writer Yahya Haqqi told me, that there are many lines, but there is only one line that you have to stick to from the beginning until it reaches you to the end”.

When he begins writing the novel, Maati is preoccupied with the emotion that he seeks to be present in the characters, events, places, and in the joints of the novel, with the exciting love stories it contains that achieve elements of suspense in the work.

Maati follows the realistic approach in writing, whether the work belongs to the historical narrative, science fiction, or the social novel, because he finds that realism is what achieves honesty and makes the reader convinced of the course of events and the characters that revolve around them.

Maati, who has published about fifty books on novels, stories and theater, believes that there is no literary genre more important than others, so the writer should pay attention to all areas of creativity, even the arts of the picture such as cinema and drama, because it will help him to describe and express.

Despite this, he tends to describe himself as a novelist because he views the world of the novel as something special and wonderful, and the writer can say whatever he wants about it.

Maati considers that our Arabic literature in general is keeping pace with the world one and is no less than it, underlining the need to convey our works to other languages and place them on international platforms, which in his opinion contributes to the increase in the number of Arab writers nominated for international prizes.

The Egyptian writer Maati looks at Syria as his second home and says: “There are Syrian friends and writers who played a real role in the development of the Arabic novel, poetry and theater, among them Yahya Haqi, Talib Imran, Salim Barakat, Zakaria Tamer, Nizar Qabbani, Hanna Mina, Muhammad al-Maghut, Saadallah Wannous, and they are my friends. I wrote about them and lived with their creativity, I realized that Syria is full of literature, art, thought and true creativity.”

For this reason, Maati publishes some of his works in Syrian institutions and publishing houses because he believes that Syria is a homeland of creativity and has institutions that promote his book and this is an advantage that may not be available in many publishing houses.

On the cooperation with the writer Maati, the literary translator, Abeer Akl, director of Dar Akl, stated that the cooperation with this author is due to his belief in our major issues and his monitoring of our reality, in addition to being a great name in the world of the novel today.

Inas Abdulkareem