Paulo Lemos Horta
Author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights and editor of The Annotated Arabian Nights and Aladdin: A New Translation.
His books recover the storytellers, translators and collaborators behind the Arabian Nights and other works of world literature. In 2017 Horta showed that “Aladdin” bears the imprint of its first teller, the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab, and of what Diyab lived on his journey from Aleppo to Paris and Versailles from 1707 to 1709.
“In “Marvellous Thieves,” a nimble 2017 study of the “Arabian Nights” and its provenance, Paulo Lemos Horta notes that Diyab, prior to recounting “Aladdin” to Galland, had attended the royal court, in Versailles, with Lucas (who made him robe up in mock-Oriental garb), and admired the bejewelled splendor of the women—a Western detail that gleams in the Eastern princess of “Aladdin.” Thus do cultures feast upon one another.”
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 24 May 2019
Breaking the story
Horta pitched a stand-alone Aladdin to Norton to preempt the mishmash Agrabah he could see coming in Disney’s live-action remake of 2019, a film that went on to gross over a billion dollars at the box office. The idea was to get ahead of the discussion and shape it, and the press obliged. On the eve of the film’s release, Time reported his findings, and the story was picked up by the New York Post, Yahoo, AOL and dozens of other outlets; in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane cited Marvellous Thieves in his review of the film. As ArabLit set out the sequence, Horta’s work had drawn attention to Diyab, and Wikipedia’s first biography of him, published that April with Marvellous Thieves among its sources, was, like the Time story, a sign of it. In 2023 ARTE’s documentary on Aladdin and Ali Baba took him to Versailles (IMDb, Letterboxd).
Who first broke the story that Aladdin drew on Hanna Diyab’s own life?
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press): first argues that “Aladdin” bears the imprint of Diyab’s life
- February 2017Literary Review, Robert Irwin: “brilliant, fluent and original”
- 2 February 2017Times Higher Education, Shahidha Bari
- 2018Recherche littéraire / Literary Research, Xavier Luffin: “extrêmement originale”
- 2018Middle Eastern Literatures 20.3, Philip Kennedy
- 27 November 2018Horta (ed.), Aladdin: A New Translation (Liveright): the introduction calls the tale “Syrian-French in its origin and composition”
- 2019Review of Middle East Studies 53.2, Melinda Cohoon
- 2019Translation and Literature 28, Claire Gallien
- 2021Horta, Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels (NYU Press): the “Diyāb tales”
- 16 November 2021Horta (ed.), The Annotated Arabian Nights (Liveright)
- 2023Horta (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights (MLA)
Global mainstream impact
- 20 October 2016Kirkus Reviews: advance review of Marvellous Thieves
- 14 November 2016Publishers Weekly: advance review
- 13 January 2017The Wall Street Journal: “Aladdin’s Many Fathers,” Charles Shafaieh
- 1 February 2017Library Journal: starred review, Ali Houissa
- 14 September 2017Ajam Media Collective: “Who ‘wrote’ Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller”
- 7 October 2017Serpentine Galleries Marathon, City Hall, London: “From Aleppo to Paris: The Origins of ‘Aladdin’”
- 2 November 2018The Guardian: “How Aladdin’s story was forged in Aleppo and Versailles”
- 9 December 2018The Monocle Weekly (Monocle Radio): Horta and Yasmine Seale on “Aladdin”
- 25 April 2019All About History: “Scheherazade and Shahryar,” quoting Horta on Diyab and Galland
- 25 April 2019Wikipedia publishes its first biography of Hanna Diyab, listing Marvellous Thieves as further reading
- 23 May 2019Time: “Was Aladdin Based on a Real Person? Here’s Why Scholars Are Starting to Think So,” Olivia B. Waxman; picked up by Yahoo, AOL and dozens of other outlets · Source
- 23 May 2019New York Post: “Experts believe Aladdin may actually be based on a real person”
- 24 May 2019Disney’s live-action Aladdin opens; it goes on to gross over a billion dollars at the box office
- 24 May 2019The New Yorker: Anthony Lane cites Marvellous Thieves in his review of the film
- 27 May 2019ArabLit: “Forthcoming: Translation of Memoir by ‘Aladdin’-teller Hanna Diyab,” reproducing a page of Marvellous Thieves and reporting the new Wikipedia entry
- 11 June 2019The Washington Post: Michael Dirda on the origins of “Aladdin,” praising the “excellent” Norton edition
- 15 December 2021The Guardian: Alison Flood on The Annotated Arabian Nights
- 20 January 2022New York Public Library: “Reading the Arabian Nights”
- 6 December 2022New Books Network: “On ‘1001 Nights’,” interview by Zachary Davis
- 20 May 2023ARTE broadcasts Thomas Staehler’s documentary Aladin und Ali Baba in Germany and France (IMDb, Letterboxd)
- 10 August 2026Deutschlandfunk: “Ein urzeitliches Schwindelgefühl,” a conversation with Julia Tieke
