Audiobooks are the Newest Addition to Safahat Sowt

Amman, Jordan: Sowt is pleased to announce the latest productions within Safahat Sowt: audiobooks!

Since its launch on Apple Podcasts in June 2021, Safahat Sowt has been offering a variety of audio articles per month from MENA best publishers. Sowt is now transforming your favorite author’s carefully selected works into an integrated audio experience that you can listen to on the go, while relaxing, or doing chores.

The first audiobook productions are “Ebra wa Kushtuban” by Fadi Zaghmout, and “Ramallah” by Abbad Yahya.

Zaghmout started writing on his blog, motivated by a passion for achieving social justice from a feminist perspective. His novel revolves around a fictional society in which the basic qualitative division of human beings is done based on their height. Accordingly, the social characteristics and roles are distributed, and personal identities form.

Zaghmout tells us that he was prompted to write the novel due to "our social condition, and the absence of social justice in our societies as a result of our division and classification of humans based on their gender."

On the other hand, “Ramallah” tells the story of the transformation of a small village under Ottoman rule in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, into a city where times overlap and destinies are severed, up to the present time.

According to Yahya, he chose this topic because "Ramallah is what remains of the city for the Palestinians. It is, in fact, the closest to the idea of ​​a modern city as it is in the world today."

While Zaghmout shared that "the audio experience in embodying the novel added life and vitality to it." He was referring to how Lana Nasser, the narrator of the novel, added theatrics  to the audiobook by giving "a vocal performance that suits the different characters."

Lana sees that “some stories long to be read out loud... they long to be listened to.” Therefore, as soon as she read a few pages of “Ebra wa Kushtuban” she was immediately drawn into the world of the tailor who narrates the story. “I saw it and heard it and wanted to embody it. I wanted to give a voice to her dreams and her pain."

For Yahya, the experience of transferring his fictional work audio represents an opportunity to highlight the plurality of voices and personalities. “The idea of ​​audiobooks is important and the interest in them is rising, and their audience is expanding in the Arab world. I have thought about it many times, but the presence of a professional establishment to produce the work, which was achieved with Sowt, turned the idea into a real production.” He adds.

The two works try to tell epic stories, in which love, history, culture, and politics intersect. What does fate hold for their characters? Listen to the books available now to find out!

Safahat Sowt allows readers to enjoy a variety of content away from their screens, created by the best publishers in the Arabic language. You can now subscribe with the click of a button and pick up hundreds of articles and new releases of audiobooks on Apple Podcasts via sow.tl/SafahatApple.

‍