Paulo Lemos Horta

Where did Hanna Diyab learn to tell stories?

The storyteller Shahrazad in Tim Supple’s stage adaptation of the Thousand and One Nights, rehearsal in Fez, 2011. Actor: Adila Bendimerad. Photo: Sophie Austin. — The storyteller Shahrazad in Tim Supple’s stage adaptation of the Thousand and One Nights, rehearsal in Fez, 2011. Actor: Adila Bendimerad. Photo: Sophie Austin.

Most likely in Aleppo, a trading city with more than sixty coffeehouses, where professional storytellers held audiences in thrall, combined familiar tales into new ones, and broke off at the height of suspense. Paulo Lemos Horta argued in Marvellous Thieves (2017) that Diyab learned his craft there and on the road with the collector Paul Lucas, a lover of fantastic tales. Diyab’s own memoir shows the same skills: stories within stories, suspense, and a gallery of characters.

In Horta’s words

“One can imagine a young Diyab sitting in one of Aleppo’s cafés, absorbing the storyteller’s words and learning his tricks for enthralling his audience.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 35

What critics and scholars said

“Tellingly, what Horta is able to surmise from Diyab’s own writing is evidence of narrative skill, a knack for deploying frame tales adroitly and injecting colour into varied social milieux.”

Shahidha Bari, Times Higher Education, 2 February 2017

More in Horta’s words (1)

“All of these elements existed in some form prior to Diyab’s intervention, but it was his telling of the tale to Galland that first brought them together to form a new tale.”
The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021), p. xxxv

More from critics and scholars (2)

“A vibrant city, it brought together diverse peoples, and was known for its coffee-houses, its gardens, with its variety of entertainers – chief of whom were the city’s storytellers. … Paulo Lemos Horta begins Marvellous Thieves with the story of one such storyteller, someone who crossed borders easily and travelled widely – Hanna Diyab.”

Anu Kumar, The Wire, 18 February 2017

“[As Horta suggests, l]ike the orators from the Aleppine coffeehouses of his youth who each night would tell new variations of tales culled from the vast trade network that converged in the Levant, Diyab may have infused this old story with details that he suspected would appeal to Galland.”

Charles Shafaieh, The Wall Street Journal, 13 January 2017

Academic priority

January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
16 November 2021Horta, The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021)

Global mainstream impact

13 January 2017Charles Shafaieh, The Wall Street Journal
2 February 2017Shahidha Bari, Times Higher Education
18 February 2017Anu Kumar, The Wire