CAIRO: Egypt has banned a number of Western and secular books from the 40th Cairo International Book Fair, including works by Czech author Milan Kundera and Morocco s Mohamed Choukri, publishers said on Monday.
The Cairo book fair, the Arab world s largest, is dominated by Islamist and educational works, and the authorities have not said why the other works were seized at Cairo airport.
The Egyptian authorities have given no explanation, we were neither informed nor consulted about this measure and the books have not been returned to us, said Rana Idriss, director of Lebanese publishing house Dar Al-Adab.
She said that four works by Kundera, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, were barred from the fair.
Germany s Al-Jamal publishers said the authorities had seized copies of Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri s autobiographical For Bread Alone which contains references to teenage sex and drug use and is banned in several Arab countries.
The taboo-busting Love in Saudi Arabia by young novelist Ibrahim Badi has also been banned, along with Women of Sand and Myrrh by Lebanon s Hanan Al-Sheikh.
The story deals with the position of women in the Gulf and mentions homosexuality. Elias Khoury, a renowned Lebanese writer who describes himself as atheist, secular and left-wing, had his As If She Were Sleeping seized.
Egypt s State Information Service says that the Cairo book fair has over the past years become a great cultural event, and a spacious scene for conducting dialogue among intellectuals, men of letters and artists. -AFP
