Al-Riyadh Newspaper | Laila Al-Jahni.. An absence missed by those present

Laila Al-Jahni is a novelist who was tired of absence and disappearance from presence and sight. She distanced herself from the platforms and devoted herself to her art of novels. Her writings began with her saying: “I have two desires that conflict with my life most of the time: not to leave an impact on anyone, and not to pass through life without leaving an impact. But in my daily life, I think that I do not want to leave an impact on anyone to the extent that it will hurt them with me, to wake up one day to find their life devoid of me, because I experienced the pain of losing loved ones, and I realized how painful the idea of ​​love is with the idea of ​​death.” Laila was not an ordinary novelist. She made herself and created her own style and literary identity that cannot be right without it. We rarely find her interviews in newspapers or filmed interviews, as she lived for one mission: “Let me be busy with writing and let them be busy with me.” She believed that writing was the first field to be liberated from the tyranny of history and the dominance of geography.

Al-Jahni, born in Tabuk in 1969, proved her presence in the local and Arab space through her masterpiece novel “Al-Firdaws Al-Yabib” published in 1997, where she won first place in the Sharjah Competition in the United Arab Emirates in 1998. The novel was chosen for publication within the “Book in a Newspaper” project supervised by UNESCO, which selects the most prominent Arab literary works for re-issuance and distribution. Al-Firdaws Al-Yabib, which was translated into Italian in 2007, was the subject of controversy and uproar between supporters and opponents after its publication, as it addressed what was unspoken in Saudi society. Some scholars have argued that Laila Al-Jahni, who stopped writing for fifteen years, brought about a change in the course of the Saudi novel. Here we are trying to offer a wave of gratitude and spread light and glow to a true creator who does not seek awards. She did not market herself in the same way as some do who do not possess her writing ability and narrative brilliance in the novel, as she fully believed that what presents you to people is your work alone, not the press or electronic noise.

Laila Al-Jahni