About us
About Marsa
Some stories belong between shores.
There are stories that don't fit neatly on one shelf. Too Arab for one audience. Too foreign for another. Too rebellious, too political, too strange, too difficult to translate, or simply written from a place publishing hasn't learned how to see yet.
Marsa exists for those stories.
Marsa means harbour: a place of arrival, departure and temporary belonging. We are an independent publishing house rooted in Egyptian and Mediterranean experience, based in Lisbon and open to the wider worlds that meet there: North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Turkey and their diasporas.
We publish writing that crosses borders without asking permission. Writing that complicates where we come from. Writing that imagines where we might go next.
Publishing
What we publish
Four lists, though the books we want most are the ones that refuse to stay inside one of them.
Fiction
Novels, novellas and short stories that take risks formally, culturally or politically. We are drawn to literary, speculative, loud and diasporic fiction, and especially to work that sits somewhere between established categories.
Non-fiction
Essays, memoir, narrative non-fiction and cultural criticism exploring identity, migration, gender, work, culture and belonging. We want writers who make us reconsider something we thought we understood.
Poetry
Original and translated poetry from emerging and established voices across the Mediterranean and beyond. We are drawn to work that crosses languages, forms and borders, and to editions that give poems room to breathe.
Translation
Literary translation between Arabic and English, alongside work crossing French, Greek and Turkish. We believe translators are writers. Their names belong on our covers.
Submissions
Submissions are open.
We're looking for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and translation with a strong voice, a reason to exist and something at stake:
- The novel that was called difficult to categorise.
- The manuscript you wish existed in English.
- The unconventional love story that refuses tragedy.
- The speculative future imagined from Cairo rather than California.
Leave your email below and we'll send you the complete submission guidelines. Established writers are welcome. So are writers who have never published a book before.
Events in Lisbon and beyond
Marsa Nights
Books should leave the bookshelf occasionally.
Marsa Nights brings writers, readers, translators, artists and wonderfully opinionated strangers together around books and ideas: readings, literary salons, dinners, debates and occasional nights that become something else entirely.
Beginning in Lisbon. Travelling wherever Marsa finds a harbour.
Newsletter
Letters from Marsa
New books and writers. Essays, translations and reading recommendations. Occasional dispatches from somewhere across the Mediterranean.