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Inspire: Spotlight Q&A with Dr Shatha Almutawa, Director of Kutubna Cultural Center Kicking off an exciting new monthly series highlighting amazing achievers!

Dr Shatha Almutawa, PhD, Director of Kutubna Cultural Center

Meet Dr. Shatha Almutawa: a poet, scholar, editor, translator, mother, and the founding director of Kutubna Cultural Center in Dubai, designed to make Arab and Khaleeji contributions to literature, the arts and scholarship more visible and accessible.
Born to a Kuwaiti mother and an Emirati father, Almutawa grew up between Dubai and Kuwait. Her lecturing career took her to prestigious universities in the US, including Cornell and University of Chicago, before returning to the Middle East to create a new cultural hub.

We sit down with Dr Almutawa to hear about why our stories matter more than ever.

What surprised you about running a bookshop/cultural center? The surprise that keeps delighting me day after day is how much little children love books. They get so excited to sit down and read for a long time. On the other hand, the surprise that keeps breaking my heart is how difficult it is to obtain Arabic books. Kutubna staff and I created many lists of Arabic books that we would like to carry in our bookshop, but we have not been able to reach many publishers we would like to build relationships with.

Top 3 book recommendations? Abdallah Alnasser’s Qahwanameh (written in Arabic) about coffee—its history, its many different preparations, the endless possibilities of extracting different flavors from it.

Amira Bu Kadra’s young adult Arabic novel Al-taamoor. It’s set in late 1960s Dubai and Bahrain and gives a snapshot of a family’s life at the end of the UAE’s pearling days and the beginning of the oil industry in the Gulf.

Finally, I always recommend Mai Al-Nakib’s An Unlasting Home, originally written in English. It is a beautifully written novel about generations of Kuwaiti women and their ties to India. This is another book that is hard to put down.

Can you share an author or book from the Gulf that made an impression on you?

In August, Shahd Thani offered a poetry writing workshop at Kutubna called Connecting with Our Ancestors that sold out within a few hours of being announced. The workshop was so powerful because Shahd has a beautiful soul. Shahd’s poetry has been published anthologies such as Dear Future Lover and Fields of Poetry.

If you could write a memoir, what would the title be? The Bookseller of Nadd Al Hamar!